Bloomberg
Summary
By pairing computer processing facilities with district heating systems, countries like Finland and Sweden are trying to limit their environmental downsides.
When Finnish engineer Ari Kurvi takes a hot shower or turns up the thermostat in his apartment, he’s tapping into waste heat generated by a 75-megawatt data center 5 kilometers away. As its computer servers churn through terabytes of digital information to support video calls, car navigation systems and web searches, an elaborate system of pipes and pumps harvests the cast-off energy and feeds it to homes in the town of Mantsala in southern Finland.
Since it began operation about a decade ago, the data center has provided heat for the town. Last year, it heated the equivalent of 2,500 homes, about two-thirds of Mantsala’s needs, cutting energy costs for residents and helping to blunt the environmental downsides associated with power-hungry computing infrastructure. Some of the world’s biggest tech companies are now embracing heat recovery from data centers in an effort to become more sustainable.
But the real value of the region is found underground, in the tens of thousands of miles of insulated pipes that snake beneath homes and offices. Many towns and cities in Finland rely on district energy systems, in which a central generation plant distributes steam or superheated water to individual buildings, campuses or whole neighborhoods. It’s a principle that dates back to ancient Rome, but the first commercial systems emerged in the 19th century; hundreds of cities in North America, including New York City, Boston and Philadelphia, have “steam districts” in active use. (They’re the source of those evocative plumes of vapor that billow up from city streets, often after rainfalls.) District energy is common in Europe and Asia as well.
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