With data centers now at the heart of our digital society, the Nordic region has attracted several large data center owners, including colocation and hyperscale companies to the region. Expected to be worth $17 Billion by 2025*, the Finnish data center economy is reported to be attracting investors with many operators being drawn to the region for reliable power supply, low energy prices and space scalability.
However, with this growth, the demand for power has increased and so too has the importance of consistent and reliable power distribution within the data center environment to ensure service stability and uptime for their clients.
The key objective for the Telia data center, which opened in Helsinki in 2018, was to reduce energy consumption by lowering losses in power distribution to improve the CO2 footprint.
To support these objectives, Telia has benefitted from several high-efficiency ABB power solutions including main transformers, UniGear Digital and UniSec medium-voltage switchgear, MNS low-voltage switchgear, and a DPA 500 Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) system.
Quality targets for the project tender were set high and ABB’s critical power infrastructure ensured that it could maximize redundancy, improve safety and deliver a scalable energy efficient data center from day one.
Timo Kontturi, head of ABB's data center segment in Finland, said: “Continuous power delivery keeps data centers beating and that system has to deliver power without interruption while simultaneously transferring power efficiently from the high-voltage network to the IT infrastructure at enterprise level.”
While extremely rare, it was critical that in the event of a power failure or a fault, downtime was reduced, and operations could continue to run. As such ABB specified its modular DPA500 UPS, which offered a scalable solution to modulate UPS capacity according to facility load. The modularity of the solution meant Telia could easily scale as their business grows, and that faults could be easily isolated for maintenance without impacting the operations of their mission critical IT load.
Kontturi continues: “For Telia we wanted to create a scalable electrical distribution infrastructure that could always be backed up to assure reliability through a parallel system that would deliver continuity in the power supply, even if a single component fails. Telia’s new data center will support Finland’s digital growth and we are proud to be part of their ambitious plans.”
UniGear Digital is part of the ABB Ability™ portfolio of connected solutions. Digital switchgear combines protection, control, measurement and digital communication to enable a safe, flexible and smart electrical network that can deliver power reliably and efficiently. It is based on the optimized integration of current and voltage sensors into medium-voltage switchgear, combined with the latest Relion® protection and control relays, and the capability of the IEC 61850 standard for communication.
Built on open communication protocols for configuring, communicating and measuring the status of the power system, the digital critical power infrastructure provides peer to peer communication and non-hierarchal controls within the network to speed-up troubleshooting and reduce latency, as well as deliver improved energy efficiency with up to 90 percent reduction in cabling compared to analogue systems. Being built on an open standard such as IEC 61850 also provided greater flexibility for future projects and operators such as Telia who are not locked into legacy systems.
Juha Ekman, project leader for the Helsinki Data Center (HDC) at Telia Finland said: “The strategic importance of the HDC for Telia and our international customers meant that we had stringent requirements to manage and assure the quality of the facility with increased redundancy and improved safety and energy efficiency. We implemented multi-dimensional quality scoring in the entire project to select the best products that could be delivered within the tight delivery timescale.
“The quality requirements were so high that only the best product suppliers succeeded in the tendering process. ABB was able to fulfill our technical requirements to the very last detail.”
