As I mentioned before, I was at an IRTF (Internet Research Task Force) workshop last week in Passau. It was my first time at one, and my mind is still buzzing from all the things I learned. This post though, is one thing want to be able to come back to – a presentation from professor Jukka Manner, from Aalto University. I’m uploading it here with a few notes, because WOW.
Off we go.
You can follow the link to download the PDF of the deck yourself, but here are the key ones slides to look at:
- slide 9 – Google as half of finished data center capacity in Finland, all by itself.
- slide 12 – The planned datacentre capacity expansion, before 2030 is about 7.7 GW. The entire Finnish grid is only 10 gigawatts in capacity. This expansion is also a 27x increase between now and 2030 . That is the biggest change I’ve seen so far in any country in such a short time.
- slide 16 – Basically all of the demand growth would have to go to data centers for this build out to be possible.
- slide 17 – how the hyperscalers responded when they were asked to be flexible to help share grid capacity
I think pulling out slide 17 is worth while, because it’s both eye-opening, but also worth discussing.
How hyperscalers responded when asked about data centre flexibility
You can see the quote that Jukka mentioned when in a workshop with someone from a hyperscaler company, about integrating datacentres into the grid in Finland:
Q: ”Can you drop your consumption if the national power grid has challenges delivering enough electricity ?
A: “We don’t have the incentive to do that”
Ouch.
To be fair, pretty much all to grid flexibility involves someone being paid for the flexibility, either in the form of compensation for changing their demand, or in the form of being allowed on the grid to make money in the first place, and this being considered the price of getting onto the grid now.
But this presentation is going to stick in my mind for a while, because before I saw this, I had some idea of the changes taking place in Finland, and this makes it so stark.
The deck also points to loads of interesting ideas beyond these wild figures, like there being an actual open data portal with the location and date of every planned project in Finland. And crucially, this being a thing that is out there, without the sky falling – something datacentre operators keep saying will happen if their location was ever public knowledge.
Heres the screenshot:
And here’s the link to the live website where this came from, and this is the link directly to the Microsoft Power BI view
It’s mind-blowing that this is not something that we have across Europe, because this is precisely the info the industry is fighting hard to have not disclosed in laws that would otherwise require it, and are arguably policy to have a meaningful data and faced based public discussion about where and how this datacentre build out takes place, and who it’s really for.
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