Draft Commission documents obtained by POLITICO ahead of the announcement show many data centers are already struggling with poor energy and water efficiency. And across the continent, local opposition groups have sprung up to protest the environmental and social impacts of expansion.
This underscores a growing tension at the heart of the EU’s tech ambitions: Europe wants to catch up with global competitors on AI, but the physical backbone required to do this — vast, energy-hungry data centers — is fast running up against limits.
Europe has less open land and less power and more expensive power and it seems poorly designed data centers.
About half of Europe’s existing data centers don’t meet a key metric on energy efficiency, meaning a significant share of their electricity is lost to cooling and infrastructure rather than computing, and roughly one in five perform very poorly by modern standards.
Europe must have data centers if they are to compete in the modern world. Investment required. What is the best solution to this problem? A great challenge for the experts.
Or larger plants. Poland plans to build AP1000s, which will be around 1100 MW each. They are also planning to build data centers next door, that will apparently consume most of the electricity generated by the nuclear plants.
From the link…
The company said power supplied to the Baltic Data Centre Campus “will come from conventional sources complemented by renewable energy and, in the longer term, also nuclear power”
Poland currently gets most of its electricity from coal.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
But other Europeans are also looking seriously at SMRs.
These Swedish plants will apparently either be GE Vernova or Rolls-Royce reactors. The UK is also planning Rolls-Royce SMR for a location in Wales.
Those nuclear plants must be 10 years away. Europe cannot wait that long for data centers. What can be done quickly? Wind and solar look attractive. LNG fueled power plants look too costly for now. New coal fired plants unlikely. Will they restart retired coal plants? How about biomass/wood chips? Possible? Cost effective?