Microsoft to build energy efficient, heat-producing data centre in Finland

by Hamuko • 4 years ago

66 52 4 years ago

perlgeek• 4 years ago

Just the other day I learned that my employer is planning the same in Germany (though much smaller scale): https://www.noris.de/wp-content/uploads/NRS1PI817_Rechenzent... (PDF, German).

knolan• 4 years ago

IBM Zurich did something similar a few years ago. Recognising the limitations of the Carnot efficiency when trying to scavenge energy from data centres, they opted to recognise the economic value of warm water for district heating.

https://www.edn.com/made-in-ibm-labs-ibm-hot-water-cooled-su...

hulitu2• 4 years ago

Finally a good use for microsoft software: heating. If there is something Microsoft does good, that is heating. Teams might be slow and full of bugs, excel might be terrible but hey, the laptop is warm and this is all that counts.

tonyedgecombe• 4 years ago

Yes, and if they have a particularly cold night then can turn on Windows update.

vimacs26• 4 years ago

I love shitting on M$ as much as the next neckbeard but how is Excel terrible? It is still the world standard when it comes to GUI spreadsheet software and all of the other competitors are at best acceptable facsimiles up till they reach a certain cell count that Excel is capable of far exceeding.

No argument from me on Teams though. That is a dumpster fire.

Decabytes• 4 years ago

As a data scientist I encounter problems all the time when someone opens up a CSV in excel and then saves it. A common thing that happens is that gene names like SEPT5 gets changed to a date

glogla• 4 years ago

Excel is a good spreadsheet, good data exploration tool, passable data wrangling tool, horrible data interchange format, and a completely terrible application platform.

When people are hating on Excel, they typically hate the latter two, not the former three.

eddieroger• 4 years ago

Gasoline is the world standard for fueling vehicles, but we know it's not the best option, just the incumbent. Something being the standard doesn't make it the best, and perhaps if people innovated over Excel, it could be better.

For what it's worth, I just moved a dataset out of Excel in to a pg database because what we were asking of it was just a hair more than a spreadsheet should be used for. It is great for collecting and viewing data, but as soon as the first complex filter came in, it fell apart. Something that was doable but challenging for me as a tech guy was not possible for my user, a parent. But a data grid with some simple filters and an export will get the job done, and thanks to tools like postgrest (not just postgres) and a React data grid, I was able to make something infinitely more usable than just a spreadsheet.

We can all agree, Teams is awful.

tjpnz• 4 years ago

While in SE Asia I would dual boot Windows specifically to drive out the ants that had found a home in my laptop. I could never get the same result with the Linux install I had at the time.

dijonman22• 4 years ago

Yuck - you couldn’t chemically exterminate them?

frameset• 4 years ago

Could you not just run `yes` once per CPU core?

potatochup• 4 years ago

I first discovered the GIL in python when I tried to peg all 8 cores on my laptop using threading to heat my bed in the winter.

absozero• 4 years ago

Sounds about right

drcongo• 4 years ago

Amazing news also for Intel.

throw0101a• 4 years ago

Aren't all data centres "heat-producing"? :)

ClumsyPilot• 4 years ago

But few capture that heat to be usable, instead of just venting it

cute_boi2• 4 years ago

Can you expound a bit? What can they do with those heat? For rotating turbines, I think they will require steam, so it is not helpful here. There might be other applications heating nearby homes. But, that's extremely unlikely. It is just like bitcoin argument where one party says they can use those waste heat to heat the home.

Correct me if I am wrong.

deodorel• 4 years ago

In my country during the communist times many cities that had some industry nearby were heated with the excess heat from those factories.

dijonman22• 4 years ago

May I ask what country that is?

ARandomerDude• 4 years ago

In Soviet Russia, factories work you.

Symbiote• 4 years ago

You can see a few examples on this page, it mentions Sweden, Austria and Finland.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating

nisa• 4 years ago

GDR had it in a lot of places (only german: https://www.prenzlauerberg-nachrichten.de/2011/06/07/kleine-...) these isolated pipes are still quite common in eastern germany. The cause was there was no gas and most energy came from coal burning and having centralized heating was more effective - also often industries supplied heat.

ubermonkey• 4 years ago

Years ago I did some process and project management consulting for a big powertrain manufacturer in Maryland. They used to be (part of) an American company, but as time passed the became a unit of a Swedish one.

Power train manufacturers have, by necessity, something they called test cells. They're rooms where an engine can be attached to a dummy shaft and run to evaluate changes to design, or test assumptions, or any of a million other things.

In Maryland, no attempt was made to capture the work done by these engines, nor was any attempt made to get value from the (hot!) exhaust.

At a similar facility in Sweden, though, the test cell engine output was tied to a power generation and storage setup, and the exhaust was captured to heat the building.

They were built at the same time. It's always baffled me.

ZeroGravitas3• 4 years ago

Almost certainly due to different regulatory regimes.

One would have accounted for the pollution and costs and the other wouldn't basically instructing the corporation to be wasteful and pollute unless it wanted to lose money by doing so.

cormacrelf2• 4 years ago

This isn’t a very deep observation. We haven’t even been told that the Swedish plant’s test-engine-heater wasn’t saving them money. Maybe the Swedes are just smart and good at spotting opportunities to reuse heat? If it was due to regulation, what regulation?

moltke• 4 years ago

Heat is really a nuisance in Maryland almost all the time, so it makes sense.

ksec• 4 years ago

I am more interested in how are they doing it. Heat loss during transfer? How much Economic value coming out of it ( heating )? How far are those homes from the Data Center?

And if something similar being done in Iceland?

doikor• 4 years ago

Iceland has easy access geothermal heat so bothering to save the heat from data centers is just stupid.

The heat is moved into the already existing district heating system. So basically Fortum can burn less coal or gas during the winter with this.

hannob• 4 years ago

This is so obvious the real question is why this isn't the default everywhere.

Heating is one of the bigger challenges regarding the energy transition, and a big user of fossil gas (and sometimes oil, coal and talking about Finland even peat, which is really one of the dirtiest energy sources imaginable). Datacenters generate lots of "waste" heat.

It requires some planning, e.g. datacenters need to be built with connections to heat grids. But given how many new datacenters get built basically everywhere, this should be a no-brainer.

Sharlin3• 4 years ago

I believe district heating is unfortunately not very common outside Northern, and to an extent, Central Europe, so there's not often anything to connect the heat output to.

jillesvangurp• 4 years ago

I'm guessing heating demand elsewhere is a bit less than as it would be in Finland. Also, Finland has a lot of infrastructure for heating in the form of city and district heating. So, it's pretty easy to connect to that and start dumping heat in it. That's not true everywhere and often the best places for data centers are not necessarily that close to population centers with district heating. For example in the Netherlands, Google and others operate data centers in a pretty remote area where wind energy is cheap and where there happens to be a major fiber optic cable coming into the country.

For new data centers, being carbon neutral or negative is pretty much a standard goal at this point for quite some time. Not only is it good for the environment but it also lowers cost and high energy costs are of course a problem if you are using lots of energy. The cheapest energy happens to be also the cleanest; hence a lot of data centers would be enthusiastic adopters of anything related to cheaper and cleaner energy. Additionally, a lot of energy is transformed into heat in the process of using it, so cooling solutions are also in scope for this.

Most data center operators are working towards carbon neutrality and have been for years. Many actually have web pages advertising their goals and current status for this. It's mainly their older data centers that are a problem on this front as those still rely on energy from the grid in places where that arguably isn't very green (like Virginia for example).

IMHO given how rich Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are, they could spend more to speed that process up and should maybe be coerced into doing so by the countries that host them under very charitable tax conditions (like my home country the Netherlands). MS seems very pleased with themselves with this data center. But of course they are still happily burning fossil fuels elsewhere.

tuukkah• 4 years ago

I think the main motivation for this in both Espoo and the neighbouring Helsinki is the cities' 2030 carbon neutrality pledges. From the data center's point of view, I wonder if the price they get paid for the heat is significant. Here's the public price list for recovered waste heat in Helsinki (around 30 EUR/MWh): https://www.helen.fi/en/companies/heating-for-companies/open...

In Helsinki, I'm already buying my certified zero-emission heat from a big 100MW heat pump station that uses waste water among its inputs. In June, they are also adding heat from a Telia data center as an input to the district heating system. They give some numbers too: "Using a heat pump, the data centre can produce at least 1.3 times the heat that it consumes as electricity." https://www.helen.fi/en/news/2021/konesalien-hukkal%C3%A4mm%...

IYasha• 4 years ago

I reuse heat produced by my server room. Don't have to be M$ for this. Clean warm air is good for heating your house, drying your laundry, etc. etc. etc.

Microsoft to build energy efficient, heat-producing data centre in Finland

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