Google announced Monday that it would begin its first heat recovery project in the Finnish port city of Hamina, where the digital giant has a large data centre.
As Ben Townsend, the global head of infrastructure and sustainability for Google, wrote in a blog post: “Heat coming out of our Finnish data center will be re-routed and provided free of charge by us to the district heating network in nearby Hamina, covering local households, schools and public service buildings.”
Google says the 97 per cent of the energy used to operate the data centre is carbon-free. Citing the local city-owned energy provider, Haminan Energia, Google also says this will cover 80 per cent of the annual demand for heat from the local heating district.
Steve Hanley wrote more about the project and others like it at CleanTechnica:
There’s a lot of talk these days about how much electricity it takes to operate data centers. Those concerns are fully justified, as those data centers consume as much as 1.5% of all the electricity generated in the world today. That number could increase dramatically if the use of artificial intelligence expands as expected. There is a secondary concern associated with data centers, namely what to do with the heat created by all those chips, microprocessors, and servers? Google announced this week that it will send the waste heat from its data center in Hamina, Finland, to that community’s district heating system.
“Waste Heat From Google Data Center To Warm A Town In Finland,” By Steve Hanley, CleanTechnica, May 20, 2024.
Read the full article originally published on CleanTechnica on May 20, 2024.
Read the write-up by Google, including a video on how it works.
