LONDON — Green Mountain deployed new Vertiv technologies to further increase efficiency and sustainability.

Based in a former NATO facility carved deep in a mountain, the DC1-Stavanger data center runs on 100% renewable hydropower and is cooled with water from the fjord, which provides a continuous temperature of 8°C year-round. The unique location offers a great advantage in leveraging renewable energy sources and minimizing cooling equipment for close-to-zero CO₂ operations. However, like all data centers, it requires UPS and thermal management systems to maintain optimal uptime.

“Sustainability affects everything we do, and sustainability is very important whenever we build new colocation centers and have new features in it,” said Alexander de Flon Rønning, Green Mountain’s design and product manager. “All customers can see where we get our energy from. It’s a key differentiator for us.”

“The Climate Neutral Data Center Pact, signed by major European cloud and data center operators, represents the latest commitment from the data center industry to reduce its environmental footprint,” said Giordano Albertazzi, president for Europe, Middle East, and Africa at Vertiv. “An effective transition to a sustainable and digital future will require both the deployment of new, state-of-the-art data center facilities and the upgrade of existing sites to harness the latest and most efficient technologies. Vertiv is proud to support this effort.”

After extensive research, Green Mountain executives visited the Vertiv Customer Experience Centers in Italy to see Vertiv technologies in action and test performances in peak conditions. As a result, Green Mountain chose high-efficiency Vertiv Liebert PCW chilled water perimeter units, for a total installed cooling capacity of 5 MW.

“For Green Mountain, the sustainability of the products and of the suppliers is a key factor when purchasing new equipment,” de Flon Rønning said. “Vertiv technologies are the most energy efficient I have seen, and this will further improve our overall sustainability, which already has an extremely high rating. Moreover, Vertiv’s systems are extremely compact. Given that our data center is carved in a mountain, we don’t have any extra rooms. We couldn’t blast through more of the mountain to make more space for data center equipment.

“Managing the project during COVID-19 was difficult,” he continued. “We were concerned that all factories and deliveries would shut down. Fortunately, Vertiv stepped up and helped, among other things, by tracking the shipments and making sure the equipment was delivered smoothly despite closed borders and logistical challenges. If Vertiv hadn’t helped with the shipments, we could not have completed the project in time.”

According to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) [1], [2], [3], data centers play a pivotal role, being at the epicenter of technology innovation, energy efficiency, renewables, and the data economy enabled by digitalization.