In partnership with WarmteStad, QTS Data Centers have announced that they will be the first company to supply residual heat for a large-scale sustainable district heating project in Groningen, the Netherlands.
WarmteStad recently completed construction of an innovative heating plant that will use 100 percent of the residual heat from the QTS Groningen data centre. Heat pumps, powered by renewable energy, deliver hot water through an existing underground heating network that has been installed at Zernike, Paddepoel and Selwerd.
It is estimated that WarmteStad will produce sustainable and affordable heat for more than 10,000 households, buildings and knowledge institutions in the northern districts of Groningen by 2026. By heating with water, buildings can operate without a natural gas connection which significantly reduces CO2 emissions and supports Groningen’s environmental goal to be completely CO2 neutral by 2035.
“QTS has quickly established itself as an important member of the Groningen business community and key contributor to the sustainable district heating project,” said Dick Takkebos, director of WarmteStad. “We applaud their commitment to re-purposing expended data centre heat into reliable, affordable and also sustainable heating solutions for the long term.”
Government Data Center North (ODC-Noord) is located in Groningen and is one of the four government data centres in the Netherlands. ODC-Noord provides data centre and cloud services to eight ministries within the Dutch government in the form of HaaS, IaaS and PaaS services.
“We are proud that, on behalf of the national government, we can further contribute to the sustainability of our data centre services using the residual heat from the data centre to heat homes in a sustainable way,” said Jaap Jansma, manager of ODC-Noord. “Sustainability is an important theme and in this way it becomes very concrete and visible.”
“We are pleased to be the first to deliver our residual heat as part of WarmteStad’s program in support of over 10,000 households, companies- and university buildings in Groningen with cost-effective heating solutions,” said Travis Wright, VP of energy and sustainability at QTS. “QTS has committed to minimising its data centre carbon footprint through innovative solutions including the utilisation of renewable energy, reclaimed water, and recycled materials to support both QTS and our customers’ sustainability initiatives.”
