- The “Limburgs Energiefonds” (Limburg Energy Fund or LEF) provides Blockheating with financing for further development of two datacenters with heat re-use in the Limburg region.
- It is expected that over the project lifespan, the datacenters will save a total of approx. 13.400 tons of CO2 across two greenhouse locations.
- With a total compute capacity of 0.4 MW these Edge locations will host up to 1000 servers, while saving significant heating cost at greenhouse locations.
Recycling waste heat of datacenters is a hot topic, but implementations are scarce. Blockheating aims to redefine the IT landscape to fit into the current society. Due to innovative cooling technology, our datacenters consume no water and less energy to keep the servers cool, while being able to deliver up to 60 degrees of useful heat. With a micro pod design of 200kW these datacenters can be placed at locations where waste heat is utilized during the year.
With this recycling process the PUE is below 1.1 without the need for evaporation of water (WUE = 0). About 90-95% of the consumed electricity will be delivered as useful heat (ERF). To further lower the CO2 impact there is an option for refurbished hyperscaler hardware.
A big opportunity for Blockheating and Limburg as a whole
“Blockheating is the perfect example of a company challenging the status quo. By using innovative cooling technology, Blockheating is able to reduce CO2 emissions and simultaneously turn waste (heat) into a valuable resource. As such, it is expected that Blockheating will make a serious contribution towards further sustainability of the greenhouse and datacenter industry in the Dutch Province of Limburg.”
Jan-Willem König, Limburgs Energiefonds
“Building the 2nd datacenter and connecting it to the existing infrastructure has been on the roadmap for over 2 years, this was the last piece in the puzzle. This allows Blockheating to extend our Limburg region with a second datacenter, allowing for failover situations as well as an optimization in cost and CO2 emissions.”
Jeroen Burks, CEO @ Blockheating
Limburgs Energiefonds: closing the financing gap
LEF is established by the Dutch Province of Limburg and is managed by Polestar Capital. LEF is an impact oriented fund and is classified as a dark green fund (Article 9 fund) under the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR). LEF helps to provide financing for promising projects in the Dutch province of Limburg with a focus on: the circular economy, energy savings, sustainable energy production and asbestos removal. LEF provides financing for projects in the form of: equity capital, senior loan(s) and/or subordinated loan(s). LEF does not provide subsidies: this means that a more sustainable projects can be accomplished. The Limburgs Energiefonds is made possible by the Dutch Province of Limburg, the European Investment Bank (EIB) and the European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI).
Blockheating: Optimizing the footprint of IT infrastructure
The goal of Blockheating is to optimize the IT operations in a holistic manner. This means a better integration into the power availability and heat demand. Innovative cooling allows for a more efficient cooling process while still achieving 60 degrees of waste heat without the need for a heat pump. This cooling integrated in micro datacenter of 200kW are placed at locations where waste heat can be utilized during all the seasons of the year.
Blockheating provides Bare metal server capacity, meaning that customers don’t need to invest in Hardware. With geo-distribution of compute capacity, a redundant and failsafe IT infrastructure can be built by customers directly or through one of our partners.
