Utilizing waste heat: Nokia vLabs data center

Nokia's vLab data center in Tampere, Finland, will start to provide its waste heat to Tempere's district heating system in a move that promotes a secular economy. This heat project will commence at the beginning of 2022 and is a move towards a more sustainable future, in line with the company's plans to become carbon-neutral by 2040 and, more broadly, Finland's vision to achieve carbon-neutrality by 2035. Moreover, this deal has been achieved through landlord Castellum.

Speaking about the company's sustainability efforts, Ron Haberman, CTO, Nokia Software, commented: "Our R&D vLab in Tampere, Finland is an important example of our commitment to taking actions against climate change. Thanks to our work with HPE Greenlake, this lab is not only carbon-neutral but it recovers the heat generated by our servers and IT systems for redistribution into the surrounding city."

Pekka Leinonen, head of B2B sales at Tampereen Sähkölaitos, added: "Excess heat recovery and transferral to the district heating network is likely a pertinent question in any city using district heating. The bigger the need to reduce fossil fuel use, the more interesting excess heat recovery becomes." 

"Due to the large volume of water, we decided together with the customer to have a larger district heating pipe built. In this way, we can use the entire capacity of the pumps and our customer doesn't lose any of the heat produced."

Heat will be provided through As is often found, Castellum is boosting the waste heat to 95°C through six heat pumps from Oilon, producing 50GWh of heat every year. Leinonen commented this is 2.5% of heating requirements, adding: "The excess heat from the data center will be able to heat 50 apartment buildings per year, that's a significant heat source for the district heating network."

Further to this, Sales Manager Jussi Alpua at Oilon outlined that while "money" was the most important investment motive, these days, "carbon neutrality" is a big factor, too.