It looked like a very large Ikea,” says John Wernvik, of EcoDataCenter. He is giving me a tour of their facility in Falun, Sweden, which could lay claim to being the world’s greenest datacentre – although to many, that is a contradiction in terms. One difference is immediately visible: this datacentre is made out of wood.
Huge panels of cross-laminated timber arrived at the site pre-cut, and were assembled by crane according to instructions, like flatpack furniture. Aesthetically, this section of the datacentre is more like an Ikea before the fit-out, a cavernous, echoey, immaculately clean hangar. The wood is not EcoDataCenter’s only claim to sustainability; it is more than just cosmetic, says Wernvik, the company’s chief external relations and sustainability officer.
Datacentres have become a dirty word and a political issue in much of the world – especially the US, where opposition to them was said to be a factor in the recent midterm elections – but here in Sweden, not so much. There is a familiar litany of reasons why datacentres are bad: they are being built without the consent or knowledge of local people; they consume vast amounts of land, electricity and water, with knock-on effects for communities and the environment; they provide no jobs and enrich rapacious tech companies. What’s remarkable is how little any of those arguments apply in Sweden, especially here in Falun, a former copper-mining town a few hours north of Stockholm.
If your abiding image of a datacentre is something like xAI’s Colossus facility in Tennessee, built at lightning speed with little public notice, partly powered by banks of unpermitted, methane gas-burning temporary generators, releasing huge amounts of CO2 and harmful pollutants into the atmosphere and the community, then EcoDataCenter is practically the polar opposite. For starters, the company’s electricity supply is 100% renewable: 75% from hydroelectric power and 25% from wind. Sweden’s power mix as a whole is virtually carbon-free – just 1% of it comes from fossil fuels (in the EU as a whole, the figure is 29%, in the US it is 55%).
In rural areas like Falun, there is sometimes too much electricity being generated by nearby hydroelectric, solar and wind, so power-hungry datacentres are actually helpful in balancing the grid. Conditions for datacentres are pretty good in Sweden as a whole. The cold northern climate means less cooling is required; the energy is not only green, it is cheap and reliable; there is plenty of water and space; and the country is relatively politically stable and well-regulated – as Wernvik puts it, “it’s very hard to develop something in Sweden where there’s not a consensus”.
Energy is still a concern at EcoDataCenter, considering this place has a capacity of 80MW (the equivalent of about 60,000 homes). There are two key measures of datacentre performance. One is carbon usage effectiveness (CUE): the carbon emissions for each kWh of energy consumed.
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