The World Greenest Data Center

What is the Internet? According to Wikipedia, “the Internet is the global system of interconnected mainframe, personal, and wireless computer networks that use the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link billions of devices worldwide. It is a network of networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries an extensive range of information resources and services, such as the inter-linked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail, Usenet newsgroups, telephony, and peer-to-peer networks for file sharing”. This breakthrough technological advance changed the world into a small village by crossing countries’ boundaries to make information accessible to everyone.

In fact, nowadays, we are becoming more and more dependent on having access to information online. But without an online connection, in other words access to servers (located in data centers), we cannot use our mobile phones, banks could not transfer money, TVs and radios couldn’t air. Basically nothing could be possible to do. This shows how important data centers are in our daily life and how our comfortable life depends on their almost timeless running. Since they have to be always running to process real-time information, data centers consume a lot of energy (their electricity consumption could be compared to medium sized cities consumptions) and the heat resulting of it, evaporated in the air contributes not only to the global warming but also is a huge waste of money. The data center that will be depicted in the following lines, called the EcoDataCenter is the World Greenest Data Center built in Fulan in Sweden and is the first ever climate positive data center.

Instead of producing its power by burning oil or worse by using nuclear power stations, this data center recycles thanks to its cogeneration plants forestry waste such as branches, treetops, sawdust, even old wooden furniture, burns them to make water boil. The steam resulting of it launches steam turbines that run generators. And generators provide power to the colocations floors in the data centers. The leftover heat from this process and the heat generated by colocation servers turned into warm water is afterwards transported into the Fulan district heating network to provide warm water in kitchens and radiators. 95% of Fulan houses are provided by the data center cogeneration plant. When the water cools down, it returns to the cogeneration plant to be use to chill servers in colocation cabinets. Furthermore, this data center has one of the Sweden largest solar panel. With additional local hydropower stations, wind farms, the EcoDataCenter is not only self-sufficient in terms of power but only meets more than half of the total energy need by Fulan municipality. This data center is definitely a paradigm shift.