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Data centers and energy balance in Finland

Rapid growth of computing during the last few decades has led to a significant increase in power consumption. With increasing operational costs, the data center industry has started to actively search for efficiency improvements to slow down the rising cost of running services. Some of the most prominent ways to cut power consumption are currently perceived to include economizers and free cooling, which unfortunately restrict applicable data center locations to colder countries. Another aspect of the data center location and cost is the electricity price, which varies significantly between regions and countries. Moreover, characteristics of annual variations in power generation and demand vary significantly between regions and therefore have an impact on temporal fluctuations of availability and price. Understanding local power generation and demand aspects hence becomes an important design issue when, for example, evaluating best data center locations. This paper presents an evaluation of Finland as a data center location. As temperature affects both the local electricity price and data center cooling consumption, focus of the paper is on evaluating optimal operating conditions for local data centers. Furthermore, the effects of data centers to the power grid and energy balance are evaluated.