Green data center opened in former mine

Ethernet, Photo: Pixabay

The data center is supplied with electricity from four hydro power plants and a wind farm in the area

 The opening took place in the data center at level 3 on Wednesday at midday, with participation from government, investors, partners and representatives of Norwegian and foreign IT companies.

 

 

The companies that were present at the Lefdal Green Mountain Data Center in Nordfjordeid municipality in Sogn og Fjordane during the opening are Rittal, IBM, LinkedIn and Fortuitus AG.

Cooling from the fjord

Lefdal My Data Center referred to by the owners as the greenest data center in Europe, and stresses that 95 percent of all power generation in Norway comes from renewable hydropower.

Some of what uses the most power in such a data center is cooling.

In Nordfjordeid shall solve this by letting the server towers center cooled with sea water from 500 meters deep, which holds a temperature of about eight degrees centigrade.

Since water conducts heat better than air, the server farms only use 1.8 kWh of cooling per 100 kWh used by the data center.

Fiber access is the bottle neck

Parliamentarian Heikki Holmås (SV) last year was very critical to the declaring data centers as green as he felt they did not re-cycle waste heat from their operations.

For a long time electricity taxes was a hindrance for Norwegian data centers, but after it was reduced, it the fiber supply that is the big stumbling block.

Group CEO Jannicke Hilland in the power company BKK called Norway, in an readers letter, a digital outpost.

– Dark fiber or dedicated fiber lines, are required by some customers and it is a scarcity in Norway, Skaane wrote.

Huge potential

According to Abelia, at least 60 new data centers in Europe are planned before 2020.

An analysis from Cisco estimates that growth will be threefold over the next five years.

In Norway, in addition to Lefdal Green Mountain, Rjukan is under development.

CEO Knut Molaug told Digi.no last year that they start building stage 2, which will provide another 1000 square meters.

 

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