Helping Denmark Lead the Way

Bob Sprengers, Penta Infra CEO, talks about renewable leadership, district heating and the future of data center design in Denmark.

Denmark is a world leader in renewables and heat reuse. It has a phenomenal wind farm sector, producing almost twice as much wind energy per capita as the second-placed country in the whole of the 38-country OECD. When you add bioenergy and solar photovoltaic (PV), renewables make up 81% of the Danish power mix. And energy reuse is just as impressive. Nearly two-thirds of Danish households use piped hot water from shared district heating networks.

At the same time, in Denmark, data center energy use is projected to rise six times by 2030 to account for almost 15% of the country's electricity use (source: IEA). As Denmark powers towards 100% renewable energy and world leadership in heat sharing, Penta Infra has played its own small part to help, leading the way in the data center sector.

Initial Investment

We first invested in Denmark in 2021 when we acquired a data center from a pan-European hosting provider in Glostrup just to the west of Copenhagen. We immediately set about modernising our new 1.6 MW CPH-1 facility, and saw the chance to improve energy efficiency and reduce environmental impact.

The data center was already 100% powered by the Danish windmill industry. We saw an opportunity to improve its heat sharing potential, using the excess heat generated from cooling customer racks. When the project was completed and certified by the TIDA in 2021 this made us the first data center in Denmark to contribute heat to the local grid, providing heat equivalent to the needs of 1,500 homes.

The next year we were delighted to receive a Sustainable Data Center Project Award for our work from the Danish Datacenter Industry (DDI) association. Our data center excess heat is now an integrated part of the energy and heating infrastructure in the municipality.

More Improvements in the Pipeline

Although we were delighted to be recognised for the project, after phase one excess heat recovery was still only running at 35% efficiency and we felt there was still more we could do as part of our rolling upgrade and efficiency improvement programme.

Over the next two years we redesigned and expanded the heat recovery element, moving from chillers and free cooling to 100% use of heat pumps. At the same time we switched from synthetic coolant (R4007A) to natural coolant (R600A). This coolant is an increasingly popular new standard for lowering CUE as it reduces CO2 impact by 99.87% compared to R4007A.

As well as improving efficiency and Carbon Usage Efficiency (CUE), our redesign and upgrade hugely increased the site’s heat reuse potential, enabling us to reuse 100% of its excess heat. Completed in 2024, the project won the DDI Sustainable Data Center Project award for the second time.

Next up

This autumn we made another major investment in Denmark, acquiring a new greenfield site in Taarby for a 20,000 square metre state-of-the art data center that will deliver 20 MW of IT load. The data center, located very close to Copenhagen Airport, will be AI-ready, offering densities of up to 120kW per rack. It will be 100% powered by wind and designed to provide liquid cooling in combination with air cooling in a 70/30 split. Needless to say, we will also be recycling all the heat it generates to provide heating for a huge number of homes.