Datacentres are deeply unpopular. Has Sweden made one we can all love?
He is giving me a tour of their facility in Falun, Sweden, which could lay claim to being the world’s greenest datacentre – although to many, that is a contradiction in terms.
Key points
- “Compared with a traditional datacentre built with steel and concrete, we lower the embodied carbon of the full structure by three times.” With a complex the size of a football pitch, that is a lot of wood, but, says Wernvik, “the amount of timber one of our datacentres uses takes the Swedish forest about 10 to 15 minutes to grow back”.
- Huge panels of cross-laminated timber arrived at the site pre-cut, and were assembled by crane according to instructions, like flatpack furniture.
- Aesthetically, this section of the datacentre is more like an Ikea before the fit-out, a cavernous, echoey, immaculately clean hangar.
One difference is immediately visible: this datacentre is made out of wood.
The wood is not EcoDataCenter’s only claim to sustainability; it is more than just cosmetic, says Wernvik, the company’s chief external relations and sustainability officer.
Additional details
- It is built of wood, resembles an Ikea and its power is totally renewable.
- It looked like a very large Ikea,” says John Wernvik, of EcoDataCenter.
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