District cooling for data center, Tampere, Finland

Computers and servers in the data center produce an enormous amount of heat. Traditionally centers have used air cooling, where warm air has simply been released into air.

 Data center opened last november in Tampere, Finland uses a different concept and relies on district cooling, which is similar to district heating except that the circulating water is cold.

After passing through the data center warm water goes through the heat exchanger warming the water in another pipeline, which transfers water to places where heat is required. One of these places will be a new open air swimming facility.

On average the energy needed for cooling the data center represents 40-50 percent of all required energy. When district cooling is used electricity consumed is only about 5-10 percent compared to earlier methods. It has been estimated that of all electricity in the world roughly 10 percent is used in data centers. Worldwide new cooling method would bring huge energy savings.

Further information: article (in Finnish) presenting the concept