Fashion retailer H&M is currently building a new 1MW data centre in Stockholm, in which waste heat will be delivered to the local district heating system.
“H&M has recovered heat from its Stockholm data centres since 2013, and the new data centre, which will be operational in 2018, significantly extends and multiplies H&M’s contribution to heating the city,” said Jan Lundin, Head of data centres, H&M.
The new data centre will be located in Stockholm Data Parks, and will connect to the Fortum Varme heat reuse system. According to the retailer, the 1MW of heat that will be produced is enough to warm around 2,500 modern apartments.
Stockholm Data Parks was launched early this year following an alliance between the City of Stockholm, Fortum Varme, Ellevio and Stokab to drive cost efficiency and sustainability for large data centres.
H&M has chosen a solution which uses heat pumps in an N+1 configuration; all excess energy will then be fed directly from the data centre to the district heating network at the required temperature.
Read more:Stockholm city to offer sustainable data centre services with new hub
In a Q&A with DatacenterDynamics, Lundin said: “H&M believes there is still a role for in-house data centres, like the one now being built, since it gives greater flexibility and, if you utilise and run its well, a lower cost.”
Fortum Varme has been providing district heating in Stockholm for many years, with 90 percent of the cities buildings connected to the district heating network. Stockholm is also recognised as one of the few cities in the world where the option for large scale heat reuse is provided.
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According to DatacenterDynamics, H&M is also consolidating its data centres based in Sweden. The sites which were first opened in 2010 were expanded in 2013 to use a liquid cooling system to feed heat into the district heating system using a heat exchanger.
Using this system is also expected to boost the cooling system for the data centre as cooling can be provided on hot days.
