Facilities Management News » Latest news

Datacentre gets hot water into Helsinki

Heated water resulting from cooling a datacentre in Helsinki is being used to help provide heat for up to 1,000 local flats.

Finnish IT company Academica installed the 2MW database server in an empty Second World War bomb shelter beneath the 19th-century Orthodox Uspenski Cathedral in the city centre, according to a report in the Guardian.

The water is first taken from the nearby Baltic Sea, desalinated, then circulated throughout the datacentre before being sent out through pipes to connect to a district heating system.

After the heat is extracted, the water will be recycled back to cool the servers again.

The datacentre began operating in the past few weeks and already the local coal fired power station has been able to reduce output, thereby cutting pollution and saving money, the report said.

‘There have been smaller implementations of similar systems,’ Pietari Päivänen, head of sales at Academica, said. ‘Datacentres are being used to heat parking lots. No one has conducted the heat towards a central heating system, however.’

Academica, which expects the system to save it £140,000 a year, said it has been contracted to build a second datacentre, but 10 times larger than the cathedral system.

The use of the underground bomb shelter has another perk, said an engineer with project management firm Helsingin Energia. ‘The servers will be very safe.’

This article was also featured on http://www.fm-world.com