Norwegian lobster farm uses waste heat from datacentre

An innovative lobster farm will use waste heat from a Norwegian datacentre for water temperature regulation.

Green Mountain, a Norway-based datacentre operator has signed an agreement with Norwegian Lobster Farm that will allow the use of waste heat from the datacentre for lobster farming. The location of the datacentre, a sparsely populated area, did not allow for more conventional methods of reusing waste heat such as district heating.

 

Green Mountain’s “DC1-Stavanger” datacentre is cooled using the liquid cooling technology. Seawater enters the facility through a gravity-fed system connected to a neighbouring fjord at a temperature of 8°C to keep the servers cool. Once the seawater has served its purpose, it re-enters the fjord at a temperature of 20°C. This is exactly the temperature that lobsters need to grow optimally.

 

To make efficient use of the warmed waste water, the Norwegian Lobster Farm will build a production facility next to the datacentre which should open in 2022, and produce lobsters for restaurants within a year. According to the lobster farm CEO, this partnership will allow them to scale up production, reduce technical risk and save both capital expenditure and operational expenditure, in addition to the environmental benefits. The farm is involved in European projects to create sustainable stocks of European lobsters on land.

 

  • For more information on liquid cooling for data centres, please download the following document on FRIDOC:

https://iifiir.org/en/fridoc/two-phase-liquid-immersion-data-center-cooling-system-experimental-142673

 

 

Sources

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252502844/Green-Mountain-signs-datacentre-waste-heat-reuse-agreement-with-Norwegian-Lobster-Farm

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/analysis/crustacean-cultivation-lobsters-and-data-centers/