A little foresight in data centre energy planning
What’s the distance between ‘r’ and ‘c’? The answer is 14 letters and about 1750km. That’s how long the submarine cable is that Farice, Iceland’s state owned company which provides international connectivity services, has laid between Iceland and Ireland, Ballyloughan Strand beach in Galway to be more precise.
Farice already had two submarine cables linking Iceland with Scotland and Denmark, but the IRIS project, which is expected to go live in early 2023, takes the country’s connectivity to another level. Farice argues that it makes Iceland much more competitive as a data centre hub.
It’s no coincidence that the new cable links Iceland to Ireland. This country is home to 70 data centres, with at least another 30 scheduled to be built in the next few years. For several years, Ireland has basked in its success as a preferred location for data centres, but for more and more people, it’s starting to look more like we have a data centre problem.
The energy requirements of those data centres appear increasingly unsustainable. They already account for more energy than rural Ireland and are expected to hit nearly 30% of Ireland’s total requirements by 2030. Whatever justification may have been advanced to rationalise that level of energy demand before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it is nearly impossible to defend now.
We are heading into a winter where the government is pledging to do everything it can to keep the lights on. That’s not reassuring. It doesn’t take a cynic to wonder if a government is pledging to do everything it can to keep the lights on, it’s acknowledging the reality that it may not be able to do so.
As Shakespeare once wrote, it’s all too easy to “desire too much of a good thing”. Certainly, Ireland has been very easy when it comes to data centres. And people are becoming understandably anxious about the impact of all those data centres on the Irish power grid. The anxiety is not just confined to the “usual suspects” of environmentalists and left-wing politicians. Ordinary people are beginning to question the rationale for Ireland’s data centre strategy. You can pull on the green jersey but it won’t keep you warm when the power goes out.
Iceland’s proposition is that it has plenty of capacity – the country has huge resources of geothermal energy (accounting for 30% of energy production) as well as hydropower (70% of energy production) – and it’s much more climate friendly because it uses renewable energy. The cooler climate also means data centres require less power for cooling.
Farice and data centre operators here, such as atNorth, Verne Global and Borealis, are not suggesting companies move all their data centres from Ireland to Iceland. But they argue it makes sense to move power intensive workloads such as high performance computing, high intensity computing, scientific computing and AI to data centres in Iceland.
The case they make is that the applications would not be harmed by the latency levels of around 10.5 milliseconds to and from Dublin the IRIS project will deliver. They estimate that 90% of typical applications would run from Iceland without issue with that level of latency.
Borealis chief commercial officer Halldór Már Saemundsson describes Iceland’s strategy as working “to become a digital suburb of Dublin” which seems like a very good way to put it. A lot of people living in and around Dublin would probably welcome the shifting of data centre power and energy requirements to another country.
The reduction in carbon emissions and savings in energy for those who choose to move HPC and other workloads to Iceland appear to be significant with atNorth claiming, using figures taken from the grid, 20% in energy savings and a decrease of 97.4% in carbon emissions compared to data centres in Ireland.
With numbers like that, Iceland seems to be doing a very good job of putting on the green jersey itself.
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