Hydropower stations and wind farms power Europe's largest and greenest data centre

Jon Lawson

Crestchic has provided two of its 1MW resistive only loadbanks to the first ever underground data centre based in Norway.

The Lefdal mine, a 120,000 square metre facility based within an old mine shaft, is set to be Europe’s largest and greenest data centre. The facility is powered exclusively by four glacial hydropower stations and two wind farms, providing a capacity of more than 300MW.

Crestchic was asked to provide two 1MW, 400v, 3ph 50Hz resistive only loadbanks. Paul Brickman from Crestchic said: “The underground location uses cold seawater from a neighbouring fjord as a cooling source. The seawater is passed through a heat exchanger and cooled from 30ºC to 18ºC to create a closed fresh water circuit, which is a very effective way of keeping the computers and servers cool. The bespoke loadbanks supplied to the mine have been created with our enhanced microprocessor-based Eclipse control package – which includes a Modbud interface for full loadbank control.”

Crestchic loadbanks feature forklift pockets in the base and lifting eyes at high level – making them easier to transport and lift into place. The Modbus mode allows the loadbank to become a stand-alone Modbus server, accepting commands from the customer’s Modbus client application program.

By using Modbus this way, the loadbank can be incorporated with other data acquisition and logging equipment to form a part of an integrated system.