The Parliament
Summary
Because there are days when it can be very cold but not windy in Finland, demand on the power grid can be very high. District heating, where hot water is pumped through whole neighbourhoods, is an efficient way to heat buildings en masse. It is also relatively easy to make carbon-neutral, as the water can be heated with waste heat from industrial processes or electric heaters.
Ninety per cent of Helsinki’s district heating is produced in combined heat and power plants, which can be run with clean electricity or indirectly-electric hydrogen – a clean fuel generated by separating hydrogen from water using electricity. Approximately 70 per cent of municipalities and cities in Finland produce district heating with renewable energy sources and waste heat.
One of these sources of heat are data centres, a growing industry in the country, which produce a lot of heat that is normally wasted. US tech company Microsoft has built a data centre that will provide about 40 per cent of the warmth for district heating for Espoo and Kauniainen, two towns to the west of Helsinki, saving 400,000 tonnes of CO2 annually.
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