An alliance including City of Stockholm, Fortum Varme, Ellevio, Stokab and Invest Stockholm have announced the launch of Stockholm Data Parks.
The joint partnership looks to develop a way for large data centres to maximise cost efficiency and sustainability with the use of low cost renewable electricity and heat recovery, all of which will then be used to heat Stockholm.
Stockholm Data Parks is to integrate the basic data centre infrastructure needs that will help minimise the costs for start-ups and data centre investor’s time to market.
The cost of electricity is to decrease to less than €0.04 per kilowatt-hour based on the recent tax change for data centres in Sweden, which as of the beginning of 2017 was implemented by Swedish Government.
According to The Power Region, electricity costs for data centres are now reduced by almost 40 percent, making electricity prices within this region one of the lowest in the EU.
The sites, which are located in Kista and Akalla, Sweden’s Internet Technology hub, will include the necessary power, cooling, heat recovery and dark fibre infrastructure.
Stockholm Data Parks is to also offer an additional free data centre cooling as a service, which will be in replacement of all excess heat when sites reaches past 10MW.
Its plan is to supply 10 percent of residential heating within the city through all recovered excess heat from the data centres.
Karin Wanngard, Mayor of the City of Stockholm said: “So far, most data centres have been built with little consideration for the environment. We want to change that. With the significant synergies between recovered data centre heat and the city’s environment objective to become fossil fuel-free by 2040, I am determined to make Stockholm a major hub for sustainable data centres.”
Colocation provider, Equinix, is one provider which has three data centres located in Stockholm. It is also believed that data parks in other locations will be added to the program.
It has also been confirmed that Stockholm Data Parks is currently working to develop additional sites in Skarpnack, Upplands-Vasby and Brista.
