In a massive cave beneath a cristian cathedral in helsinki, finland a city power firm is developing a data center which will apparantly be the greenist on the planet.
Uspenski cathedral is one of helsinkis most tourist sites and will have located under neat it a computer data system. The excess heat from the computer servers will be channeled into a heating network used to heat homes in finland's capital. This is known as cloud computing.
Data centers such as those run by Google already use around 1 percent of the world's energy, and their demand for power is rising fast. One major problem is that in a typical data center only 40-45 percent of energy use is for the actual computing the rest is used mostly for cooling down the servers.
The green part is, besides providing heat to homes in the Finnish capital, the new Uspenski computer hall will use half the energy of a typical data center. Its input into the district heating network will be comparable to one large wind turbine, or enough to heat 500 large private houses. Also when expanned as planned, it will cut 375,000 euros off the companies annual bill.