District heating goes digital
Servers and computers generate a lot of heat. Two Finnish companies have found a clever way of cooling them down. The benefits turned out to be.. binary.
Holy heat. In a cave below the Uspenski cathedral, a computer hall is generating 2mw of heat for the district heating network. (Photo: Stockxpert)
In a cave under the Eastern Orthodox Uspenski cathedral in Helsinki we find the result of a joint project between Academica and Helsingin Energia; the world's most eco efficient computer hall. Computer halls usually require a lot of energy in order to keep the computers from overheating, but this computer hall is cooled down by district cooling. And that is not all, the heat generated from the computers is then distributed back as district heating!
Helsingin Energia reckons that in district cooling the primary energy consumption of the computer hall now commissioned is only 20% of that of a standard computer hall, and the additional benefit of the waste heat recovery is a bonus. They are in other words saving money and generating energy all at once.
Heating Helsinki
The district cooling is produced from the thermal energy from heat pumps, cold seawater or energy generation that would otherwise be wasted. The heat produced by the computers is piped via a heat pump into the district heating network to heat Helsinkis buildings and the residents' domestic hot water. The computer hall under the cathedral has the capacity to heat 500 large single-family houses in Helsinki.
- A rough estimate, the total consumption of Finnish computer halls is 0,5 % of all electricity consumption. If all computer halls operated like ours, 500mwh of energy would be saved every day. And at the same time, a medium sized towns worth of buildings could be heated, says Academica's CEO in a press release.
Further reading
Read more about the world's most eco-efficient computer hall here, and district cooling here.
Learn how computers are cooled down in Iceland.
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