Underground sustainability

60 metres to the bottom from here.

Last week after the course we visited a fairly interesting place with a few of the SGT course participants. Did you know that Helsinki has a vast network of man-made tunnels and caves housing much of the industrial infrastructure, including huge district heating and cooling systems? The city of Helsinki even has an underground master plan.
 
Part of this subterranean world was our destination. Located 30 meters below the Uspenski Cathedral is a data center owned by IT company Academica and developed in collaboration with energy company Helsingin Energia.

The cave in the bedrock.

The revolutionary thing about this data center is that it uses district cooling to cool down the computers, while the waste heat produced by the servers is piped via a heat pump into the district heating network. When the underground hall is full of computers it produces enough heat to heat up to 500 large single-family houses in Helsinki.
  

Each of the server rack units has its own control system.

 

Currently majority of the data centers in the world are putting the heat they generate into the atmosphere. Eco-efficient computer halls like this one can save significant amounts of energy by actually recycling it.

In 2010 Academica’s server center was chosen as the most energy efficient and it was given the Green Enterprise IT Award.