Irish companies putting sustainability at the heart of Nordic data centre boom

Irish accents have become very common in the city of Gävle, some 170km north of Stockholm, in recent years as skilled workers employed by Irish construction companies boost the local population of 75,000 people. The local Gaelic football club is thriving, and several Irish companies have already opened up offices there with a view to being in Sweden for the long haul.  

At any given time, there are hundreds of these workers on sites there, looking after everything from general construction to fireproofing and lightning conduction in a segment of the building industry that is booming.  

Virtually every major tech company in the world is to some extent dependent on these workers, their employers and the projects they deliver- from Google and Amazon to social media sites like Facebook and X (formerly Twitter), these companies operate in the cloud, pooling their computing resources in huge data centres. With generative AI in the form of ChatGPT having made a big breakthrough in recent times, demand is not likely to decline any time soon.  

The building of these hyper-scale datacenters creates a need for many different resources. Chief among them is energy, and thanks to Ireland being one of the world’s first data centre hubs, Irish firms are well-placed to both build what is needed and address any sustainability and environmental issues that may crop up along the way.  
 

Having worked with the likes of Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Yahoo, and Facebook, Irish contractors, construction services and engineering companies gained a wealth of valuable experience.  

The latest generation of self-build hyper scale data centres under construction across much of the UK and Europe may not quite come with a ‘Made In Ireland’ label attached, but it wouldn’t be stretching the point too far to apply it, given the influence of Irish companies on the sector.  

But in order to open the door to these opportunities, firms are well aware that they must present their sustainability credentials to both their clients and the Swedish authorities.  

"We are accredited to the internationally-recognised ISO 14001 Environment Management System (EMS), which is a systematic framework to manage the immediate and long-term environmental impacts of an organisation’s products, services and processes,” says David Fox, Operations Director at Jones Engineering.  
 

”We work together at all levels to develop the correct attitude, practice and work habits, to ensure that we are continually improving our environmental performance and these same high standards are the bedrock of our sustainability approach in Sweden."

Climate-Neutral Pact
 

Whereas once they were considered “nice to have”, such frameworks are now an essential part of doing business in Sweden, thanks in no small part to the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact, which was signed in 2021 by over 100 data centre operators and trade associations, with part of the agreement ensuring that data centres will be climate-neutral by 2030.

That pact is backed up by a slew of European Union legislation that has raised the standards from self-regulation by the industry to a set of concrete laws and rule that apply to it. Among the laws and regulations are the  EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres, the Ecodesign Regulation on servers and data storage products, the EU Green Public Procurement criteria for data centres, server rooms and cloud services,  the Taxonomy Regulation and its Delegated Act , as well as The Digital Operational Resilience Act, or DORA, which now governs energy efficiency and sustainability monitoring of data centres.

This legislation adds a level of complexity to an already complex construction task, but the combination of the Swedish environment and Irish know-how has proved to be a winning formula when it comes to addressing it.  

Aside from its world-class connectivity and infrastructure, Sweden benefits from a cold winter climate that allows outside air to be used for cooling the data centres – something which requires enormous amounts of energy and equipment in warmer climates. Sweden is also at the forefront of developments in sustainable energy, which makes a huge difference to carbon footprints over the life cycle of the buildings.  

These Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) have become key to understanding the sustainability and environmental impact of data centre projects, and nothing is left to chance. The end-to-end impact of the entire project is assessed, measuring material and energy use of each process (from embedded carbon in raw materials, manufacturing, transport, use, disposal and/or recycling).  

LCAs often stretch along the entirety of the supply and chains, ensuring that we avoid 'carbon tunnel vision' by taking into account all areas of sustainability are considered, such as the impact on nature and society, air pollution, eutrophication, and water and heat re-use. Such efforts have brought out the best in Irish companies as they have to dig deep into the environmental impact of everything they do.  

“Collen evaluate the carbon footprint of the building by tracking the embodied carbon of the construction materials and products using a special EC3 tool,” says Fabrice Maurizot, Regional Operations Director at Collen Construction.

Making the Most of Energy Usage

As is well known, data centres use a vast amount of energy, and much has been done by Irish firms to ensure that as little as possible of the energy used goes to waste - and in many cases, they have come up with ingenious solutions to harness the excess heat produced and pump it back into local communities.  

“The data centre in Copenhagen is equipped with a waste heat recovery system that is connected to the public heating network. The heat produced in the data halls is captured and transformed into hot water through heat exchangers, and then pumped into the public system to provide heating to the local community,” says Fabrice Maurizot.  

Collen have also introduced a new battery energy storage system (BESS) in Gävle which stores excess heat as electric energy in batteries for future use. This system is part of a move away from old-fashioned diesel-powered generators, which were previously used as back-ups in case of power grid failures, towards more sustainable alternatives.  

Data centres are also increasingly engaging in a practice known as “going behind the meter' – rather than using the local energy grid, data centre providers have been going off the grid and building their own electrical substations and transmission lines to power their data centres directly, often using renewable sources of energy.  

Sustainable Ways of Working

Sweden’s laser-like focus on sustainability extends into every aspect of a construction project, covering the materials used to build the structures and even the tools and techniques used to put them together.  

For Alan Doyle, Business Development Manager at LPI Group, a huge amount of thought and work goes into the planning of what they are going to do, long before they arrive on site.   

"Working sustainably for LPI Group involves a series of techniques, including using 3D modelling software like CDEGS. CDEGS allows us to design off-site and save time at installation, reducing waste of materials on-site by refining order quantities of materials reducing off-cuts of copper,” he says.  

General contractors running such projects are responsible for ensuring that all the equipment used on site meets the required standards, even that which comes from sub-contractors. This necessitates having both robust processes and a high level of trust between the different contractors that work together on each of these projects.  

Data-driven Developments for Better Future Projects 

It is perhaps a little ironic that the companies leading the way in data centre construction are becoming increasingly dependent on data themselves, collecting and processing information to improve the planning and execution of future projects.  

Harnessing the data from each project and sharing best practices drives more sustainable decision-making and greater efficiency in building at speed.  

The intelligent use of such data moves projects forward and provides quality, up-to-date information which will reduce future mistakes, drive operational knowledge transfer, and streamline the handover process when projects are finally completed.  

From relatively humble beginnings, Irish companies are now exerting enormous influence in the Swedish data centre segment. Having shown the quality and speed of their work and their commitment to doing it in a sustainable way, they are branching out into other areas of the construction sector – and in a country that prides itself on sustainability the way Sweden does, that is no mean feat.