The Demark Data Centre Industry is starting to certify the environmental impact of data centres. The initiative comes after a number of years of great growth in the number and size of data centres in Denmark. The certification ensures transparency and thereby increases demand for green IT and the development of more sustainable data centres.
Denmark has become a data centre country in recent years, where the number and size of data centres grow as Danish and foreign companies put their servers and data centres in the country. It is a development driven by three significant trends, companies moving servers in colocation data centres and the cloud, more and more functions in lives and work are driven by IT and Denmark’s successful attraction of data centres from giants such as Apple, Facebook and Google
Reports on data centre development indicate that data centres will spend between 10 and 20 per cent of Denmark’s electricity consumption by 2030. With successful growth comes to a responsibility to contribute with sustainable technologies in data centres. That is why the company is now starting certification of data centre projects that are doing something special to reduce energy consumption and reuse surplus heat.
“Data centre operators in Denmark have for several years done a huge amount of work to reduce power consumption. And with new changed energy taxes, 2021 has opened up better opportunities for the utilisation of surplus heat from data centres, ” Henrik Hansen, CEO of Data Centre Industry, said. “Some operators are already using their surplus heat to produce district heating. We are now introducing this certification so that customers can use our certification in their choice of green data centres for their IT solutions.”
Knowledge of the certification must be disseminated to customers nationally and internationally so that both demand and supply will grow for the benefit of the environment. The certification will be developed with a scale for the green profile. It must ensure that continuous work is done to improve the climate footprint of data centres with the opportunities and technologies that are available.
A committee of 12 people, with members inside and outside the data centre industry, is put together to assess the data centres applying for green certification. The composition must ensure both industry experience and a critical view from representatives of universities, educational institutions and others. Initially, there are four data centres that have had their solutions for recycling the surplus heat for use in district heating certified. These are JN Data in Silkeborg, Danfoss in Als, DTU in Risø and Penta Infra in Albertslund.
