Underground data center to help heat Helsinki

In the chill of a massive cave beneath an orthodox Christian cathedral in Helsinki, Finland, a city power firm is preparing what it thinks will be the greenest data center on the planet.

Excess heat from hundreds of computer servers to be located in the bedrock beneath Uspenski Cathedral, one of Helsinki's most popular tourist sites, will be captured and channeled into the district heating network, a system of water-heated pipes used to warm homes in the Finnish capital.

"It is perfectly feasible that a quite considerable proportion of the heating in the capital city could be produced from thermal energy generated by computer halls," said Juha Sipila, project manager at Helsingin Energia.

Beneath Helsinki's Uspenski Cathedral a new data center is being built whose heat will help warm homes in the Finnish capital.

(Credit: Jrielaecher/Wikimedia Commons)

Finland and other north European countries are using their water-powered networks as a conduit for renewable energy sources: capturing waste to heat the water that is pumped through the system.

Due online in January, the new data center for local information technology services firm Academica is one way of addressing environmental concerns around the rise of the Internet as a central repository for the world's data and processing--known as "cloud computing."

Companies seeking large-scale, long-term cuts in information technology spending are concentrating on data centers, which account for up to 30 percent of many corporations' energy bills.

Data centers such as those run by Google already use around 1 percent of the world's energy, and their demand for power is rising fast with the trend to outsource computing.

One major problem is that in a typical data center only 40-45 percent of energy use is for the actual computing--the rest is used mostly for cooling down the servers.

"It is a pressing issue for IT vendors since the rise in energy costs to power and cool servers is estimated to be outpacing the demand for servers," said Steven Nathasingh, chief executive of research firm Vaxa.

"But IT companies cannot solve the challenge by themselves and must create new partnerships with experts in energy management like the utility companies and others," he said.

Data centers' emissions of carbon dioxide have been running at around one-third of those of airlines, but are growing 10 percent a year and now approach levels of entire countries such as Argentina or the Netherlands.

Energy savings
Besides providing heat to homes in the Finnish capital, the new Uspenski computer hall will use half the energy of a typical data center, Sipila said.

Its input into the district heating network will be comparable to one large wind turbine, or enough to heat 500 large private houses.

"Green is a great sales point, but equally important are cost savings," said Pietari Paivanen, sales head at Academica: the center, when expanded as planned, will trim 375,000 euros ($561,000) a year from the company's annual power bill. Academica's revenue in 2008 was 15 million euros.

"It's a win-win thing. We are offering the client cheap cooling as we can use the excess heat," Sipila said.

The center's location in the bowels of the cathedral has an added bonus: security. It is taking over a former bomb shelter carved into the rock by the fire brigade in World War II as a refuge for city officials from Russian air raids.

Story Copyright (c) 2010 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

[bsharkey]

great idea

[johnnygninja]

i love hearing about stuff like this. I'm not a tree hugger by any means, but I hate waste. This is awesome

[gerrrg]

I already do something like that...my computer's heat keeps my place warm enough to keep the heater off except when it snows outside.

[Lerianis3]

Now this is a good idea! I wonder why no one thought of this a LOOOOOOONG time ago, putting these data centers underground and using the 'waste heat' from them to heat other things that needed heated.

[sandor_f]

because they heat up the ground in the summer too, increasing the heat island effect, etc. <br /><br />something like this should be undertaken, but it is still only useful (or more useful) in certain areas of the world where temperatures require more heating of households than cooling of households.

[susiaho]

They do not do this everywhere, since there is no infrastructure to make this possible. This kind of recycle works in Helsinki. I am sure there are other ways to do it elsewhere. <br />When the heat is not needed to heat houses, one could dump it to the ground, the sea or air. The heat could be used to generate steam, aggravate chemicals producing something useful or in various forms. Heat is also movement, on a very basic level, it can be used in a lot of stuff.<br />Modern research also shows, that you can run a datacenter (under certain rules and conditions) without cooling the air, just by changing it. Design also plays a key part, like Microsoft showed us, with their new center in Dublin.