according to a report by facebook, its planned data center in odense, denmark, the third largest city in the country, will supply heated air to the district cooling system employed by the city through a heat pump that delivers hot water.
facebook's new denmark data center will provide heat to the city's cooling system. (wikimedia commons)
the system is run by fjernvarme fyn, a local company that supplies odense with district cooling technology.
the data center will be cooled using outdoor air and powered by renewable wind energy, according to facebook, and it will share 100,000 megawatt hours of energy per year that will produce enough heat to warm 6,900 homes.
“this energy will be recovered from our servers, and recycled by a newly-constructed heat pump facility powered by 100% clean and renewable energy,” facebook explained.
“multiple wind turbines create and add renewable energy to the electric grid powering our facility, including our servers,” the report continued. “while we design our own servers to minimize the heat they create, in odense we will direct air heated by the servers over water coils to recover the heat by raising the temperature of the water.
“the temperature of the warm water is further raised by a heat pump facility powered from renewable energy. the hot water is then delivered to the district heating network and distributed to the local community.”
the data center broke ground in january 2017 and is expected to come online in 2020.
an article from data center dynamics added that denmark is not the only country to take advantage of data centers for district cooling.
“district heating is well established in the scandinavian nations,” it said, “and in sweden, stockholm has a number of data centers connected to a district heating system operated by fortum warme, a heating company which early in 2017 helped set up stockholm data parks, a campus at kista in stockholm, which promises low energy costs as well as a smaller environmental footprint.”
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