H&M, the global fashion retailer, will build a new 1MW data center in Stockholm, Sweden. The new facility will be designed from the outset for heat recovery, so that the energy produced by servers will be recovered and allocated to the city power grid.
Energy recovered from the H&M data center will be redistributed to residential customers by energy company Fortum Värme. Heat recovered from the new data center is expected to provide enough energy to support heating requirements for 2,500 apartments in the city.
The new facility, which is expected to be operational next year, recovers heat using pumps in an N+1 configuration, providing for redundancy should a heat pump fail. Excess energy recovered from the data center will be fed directly to the Stockholm power grid at the correct temperature, where it will be distributed to residential clients of Fortum Värme.
H&M’s new 1MW data center is a part of Stockholm Data Parks, a joint initiative between the city of Stockholm and Fortum Värme, to provide infrastructure to make Stockholm a preferred location for large data centers that provide heat recovery.
H&M has been providing recovered heat to the city’s energy grid since 2013, but the addition of a new facility will significantly increase the company’s contribution to the residential energy supply.
Erik Rylander, Head of Stockholm Data Parks at Fortum Värme, said that H&M can build on prior experience with heat exchange to create a new data center that is designed for heat recovery from the outset.
“It’s fantastic that a growing number of companies are connecting their systems to our district heating network and stop wasting data center excess heat. I’m particularly thrilled that H&M, which has been gaining experience of heat recovery in recent years, has decided to design its data center with a redundant cooling and heat recovery solution from the outset. It’s smart and profitable, and together we can make Stockholm even more sustainable,” he said.
The goal of the Stockholm Data Parks initiative is to one day meet 10% of the city’s heating requirements through heat recovery. This goal is made attainable because a large percentage, close to 90%, of all buildings in Stockholm are connected to the district grid and can easily benefit from heat recovery programs, making Stockholm on of the few major metropolitan centers suitable for such a target.
