Telia’s Helsinki server center balances the local electricity network
Telia joins Ericsson’s DigiPlex in Fortum Spring’s “virtual battery” partnership
Earlier this month, the Nordic telephone company Telia and the European energy company Fortum announced the agreement which connects the data center in Telia, the capital of Helsinki, to the regional electricity market. The Helsinki data center uses UPS systems manufactured by ABB. The batteries help to balance the power needs of the regional network.
Telia and Fortum have been testing the system since 2021, and this announcement confirms the relationship. Since then, HDC has brought several megawatts of capacity to Fingrid’s Fast Frequency Reserve (FFR) market. FFR is a backup power service that prevents the frequency from falling below 49.7 Hz. Nordic energy companies such as Statnett, Fingrid and Svenska Kraftnät offer FFR, which increases the resilience of the Nordic electricity grid to large-scale power outages or power outages.
The agreement between Telia and Fortum is a “Fortum Spring” virtual battery solution developed by Fortum. The batteries in the HDC’s UPS equipment are used to balance the regional power grid.
Batteries prioritize local needs until backup generators can take power. The companies said the exchange would take place in a few hundred milliseconds.
“It’s like a virtual battery that brings together customers’ flexible consumption to compensate for fluctuations in grid load, ”Fortum said.
A new perspective on the operation of green data centers
The U.S. Department of Energy says so computer room operations account for about 2% of all electricity consumed in the United States (worldwide, this figure is about 3%). The DoE said data centers consume 10 to 50 times more energy per square foot than a normal office building.
The construction of server centers continues to grow. Hyperscalers and other companies with high data transfer requirements have replaced smaller, cross-linked enterprise server centers. Global energy use in data centers has remained fairly stable over the past decade. However, the demand for data has increased geometrically, according to a recent report by the International Energy Agency.
Local UPS systems provide continuous power to data centers, but so far they have only been a drain on costs. It will change with Fortum Battery, says Ilari Alaperä, Fortum’s Business Development Manager. Companies that use data centers like Telia can now reap unexpected returns on a significant capital investment while doing the same for the environment.
Those larger data centers take advantage of economies of scale to obtain electricity cheaply. New construction methods and newer data center equipment emphasize efficiency. In addition, the owners and operators of these data centers want to offset their environmental impact. They pay carbon tax credits, procure renewable energy and build their own renewable energy sources.
“[We] take the development of the Nordic electricity system towards a cleaner future, ”Alaperä said.
Smooths peaks and troughs
Fortum noted the role of high-capacity data centers in the most environmentally conscious operations possible and in the active operation of the energy system. Renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power are extraordinary, Fortum said.
“The key is to smooth out the peaks and troughs in demand,” explained Fortumadds “UPS systems and their batteries provide very fast control power and are ideally suited to the power reserve maintained by Fingrid.”
Telia is just Fortum’s latest success story. Fortum recently signed a three-year agreement with data center operator DigiPlex, which owns and operates facilities in Finland and Norway. In 2018, Ericsson and Fortum announced a partnership that connected the UPSs of the latter Kirkkonummi data center to the power grid.