On the menu: Norwegian cloud lobster

Norwegian seafood farmers are supercharging their farms with the help of data centers.

Data center operator Green Mountain has been teaming up with local aquaculture farms to reuse the water its servers need to cool down.

"About four years ago, we did a study with some master’s degree students to look at what industries are best fit to utilize waste heat outside of district heating," recalled its Chief Executive Officer Svein Atle Hagaseth. "We looked at 35 different industries. One of those was onshore fish and lobster farming," he said in an interview.

On the country’s west coast, at the Rennesøy site, Green Mountain is now directly delivering the water from the data center’s cooling system to a land-based lobster farm.

To grow optimally, the crustaceans need a temperature of 20 degrees Celsius — which, coincidentally, is about the temperature of the fjord seawater after it goes through the data center. It is also available all year round, allowing the lobsters to grow to a consumption-ready size in a year and a half, down from five years.

Data powerhouses across the world, including in Europe, have been increasingly trying to become greener, pressed by policymakers and self-regulating initiatives, and have started exploring ways to make the most of the excess energy they produce — heating buildings and homes or using it for agricultural purposes, for instance.

The International Energy Agency estimated that data centers accounted for about 1 percent of the global final electricity demand in 2022.

About 200 kilometers further inland from Rennesøy, in Rjukan, another Green Mountain data center is connected via a pipe system to a land-based trout farm. There again, it’s the cooling water that is repurposed to breed fish, which need a temperature of 14C.

The trout farmers "mix our water together with water directly from the stream" to get the right temperature, Atle Hagaseth explained. "The good thing about that is that we then can use that colder water back into the data center again," he said.

The data center company is trying to show the way on the circular economy by giving away its heated water free of charge. "We want to make sure that there are good examples out there of alternative heat reuse candidates," its CEO said.

While these two projects don’t directly allow Green Mountain to reduce its own energy usage, they allow other industries to do so.

The Norwegian operator hasn’t received any subsidies, but Norwegian Lobster Farm — the company breeding the crustaceans — received three grants from the EU’s research and innovation funding program Horizon 2020 to develop the farming technology.

Norway, which enjoys a surplus of renewable energy and low electricity prices, was the first country to publish a national strategy in 2018 to make the country an attractive location for data centers and pioneer sustainable industry growth. It was updated in 2021 and is now going through another revision.

Green Mountain is not the only one trying to make good use of its waste energy. Stack Infrastructure’s data center in Oslo has been repurposing its excess heat into the capital’s district heating system, providing heat and hot water for up to 5,000 homes.

"From our point of view, utilizing excess heat from data centers in Norway will be key to achieve long-term sustainability in the Norwegian data center industry," Gunn Karin Gjul, the Norwegian state secretary for digital, said in an statement.

The EU too is incentivizing projects that boost its progress in meeting both digital and sustainability goals, in what it calls a "twin transition" to green and digital economies. Within the bloc, data centers accounted for 2.7 percent of electricity demand in 2018 — a figure that could reach up to 3.21 percent by 2030 on the current trajectory.

European lawmakers and EU ambassadors in July endorsed the new Energy Efficiency Directive, among the last outstanding pieces of legislation in the bloc’s Fit for 55 climate package. It sets a legally binding target of 11.7 percent reduction in final energy consumption by 2030. The directive introduces new transparency obligations for data centers on energy performances and waste heat repurpose requirements.

Europe’s newfound appetite for data localization and tech sovereignty is also helping a hand in pushing forward Green Mountain’s sustainability business.

In March, the data center firm announced a major deal to build a new site, set to become Norway’s largest data center campus, in the Hamar region, to support TikTok’s increasing data storage needs in Europe as part of "Project Clover" — TikTok’s European counteroffensive to assuage politicians’ concerns over Chinese surveillance.

"While there are multiple factors we consider when contracting for data storage, we are pleased that our Norway data centre will run on 100% renewable energy and contribute to the local economy, aligning with our long-term aspiration of building a sustainable business," a TikTok spokesperson said.

The new facility has a potential capacity of 150 megawatts — the equivalent of producing the energy needed to grow all tomatoes and cucumbers in Norway with traditional heat for as long as two years. "We have a lot of discussion now with Norway’s largest hydroponic greenhouses to get them to establish at the site," Green Mountain’s CEO said.

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