Super cool: Arctic data centres aren't just for Facebook Dotted around the near-Arctic are several data centres, each taking advantage of the cold air in that region. We know that low temperatures are great for cooling, but it isn’t the only reason that operators chose those locations. Facebook opened its data centre in Luleå, northern Sweden in 2011. Google rolled out its Hamina …
The Baltic is relatively shallow and has a very limited channel to the larger ocean. While it freezes in winter - in summer it warms up nicely compared with the North Sea or North Atlantic.
The Arctic areas in Finno-Scandinavia can get very warm in the summer months with 24 hour daylight and even sunshine.
Seconded.
I have some recollections from an old trip to Finland in early July. I remember swimming and windsurfing off Espo in Helsinki bay which had the water at 24C and the air at 30C with 22 hours of non-stop (albeit a big hazy) sunshine. The only unpleasant part was the ridiculous humidity.
At the same time, the supposedly subtropical Black Sea* was still at freezing cold 16-18C (I was there just the week before going to Helsinki).
*In those days it was nowhere near as polluted and overfished as now so there was none of the positive feedback of algae->better absorb heat from sun->more algae blooms of today.
"The only unpleasant part was the ridiculous humidity."
The fly in the ointment is literally the midges - particularly at the sea or lake edges in the shade of trees. Lakes, islands, and trees describes Finland's main features. It is said that the further north you go - the more voracious the midges become. They usually die off near the end of July over a period of only a few days.
Summer temperatures in southern Sweden are comparable to Blighty - even extending to the legendary heatwave we shared in 1976[1] . But even there the warm season is short: right now[2] there could still be snow and frost, and that frost may return by early September. But in northern Sweden, anything into double digits is a warm summer day. And the summer is of course even shorter. They don't call the ground there "permafrost" for nothing.
[1] In 1976, even our local (Småland, southern Sweden) lake reached 28 degrees at the surface, though swimming down was refreshingly much colder. That's the only time I've known it to peak above 22.
[2] Last time I was there in early May, for my granny's 90th birthday, daytime peak temperatures were around 3 degrees.
The maximum ever outside air temperatures in large parts (if not all) of Scotland are well below the maximum inlet air temperatures required by modern equipment, and an awful lot closer than Scandinavia or Iceland.
Like they say we like summer in Scotland it's our favourite day of the year.
All my Great Grand Parents are from Finland, north of the arctic circle (the family homestead is just a day's ski north-west of Kittilä (although we pronounce it "Gihttel")). I have over-wintered with my kin five times. I thought I knew something about snow & ice (Alaska's Denali). Boy, was I wrong ...That said, as a Great Sage once commented:
"The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco."
--Samuel Clements
So we move all these servers up North and one day a funny cat video causes an Internet meltdown with a massive spike in server activity in the Arctic - resulting a a heat spike and the icecaps melting. The sea level rises and Twitter and Instagram erupt, causing a further meltdown.
But on the plus side, the heat differential will cause a lot of wind - so we can probably power the whole thing via wind farms - reusable energy at its finest.
Its not really the climate, it's the price of electricity and sources of water for cooling to reduce running costs. Know someone who is currently involved in the building of the arctic circle datacentre, in Norway.
As has been said, the summers are not cold, gets to be in the mid 20s and sometimes in the mid 30s, this is in the arctic circle.
>but for companies with a singular focus on one workload such as Bitcoin-mining
I was so hoping that jack wagon from Australia was the founder of bitcoin so he could then turn around and flood 1 million bitcoins on the market (even the threat would have knocked the price down) so that when the price goes to pennies where it belongs that energy and computing power goes towards something useful.
Data centres should tie in with the NHS (bare with me). Hospitals have to be hot all the time, and servers have to be cold. Why not colaborate and build small data centers in the grounds of hospitals and essentially the hospital pays a share of the electricity costs in return for the heat. Saves on fuel costs for the hozzy and electric costs for the DCs.
This is actually done in Helsinki. Helsinki has both district heating and district cooling infrastructure, data centre heat is dumped into district heating.
The cool thing about district cooling is that it's mostly powered by unused "waste" heat from the district heating return. Thus, trigeneration powerplants reach extremely high efficiencies. Having 86 million litres of water to store heat and cold in also helps them run the powerplants at their optimum efficiency ratio regardless of the uneven demand on the different energy forms throughout the day.
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