Helsinki recovers 90% of data centre heat to warm 28,000 apartments

Image Credit: Helen(City of Helsinki) Helsinki is finding a practical use for the enormous amounts of heat produced by the equipment running inside data centres. Through a collaboration between Finnish energy company Helen and telecommunications company Telia, waste heat from Telia’s Pitäjänmäki data centre is being fed into the city’s district heating network. The system is expanding as the data centre grows, with plans for the recovered heat to eventually meet the heating needs of up to 28,000 apartments. At the same time, Telia has increased its waste heat recovery capacity to as much as 90%, turning a larger share of the facility’s previously unused heat into a resource for the city.Helsinki turning data centre waste heat into warmth for 28,000 apartmentsData centres contain thousands of devices that work continuously to process and store digital information. All that equipment generates heat, which must be removed to keep the systems operating safely.At Telia’s Pitäjänmäki data centre, north of Helsinki, that excess heat is no longer treated simply as something that needs to be discarded. Instead, it is recovered and transferred into Helsinki’s district heating network, where ...