Data centre boom threatens benefits of Finland’s green electricity

Data centres could undermine the environmental benefits of Finland’s green electricity production, three researchers told Yle. Fingrid forecasts that electricity consumption could rise by as much as 40 per cent in the next five years, driven particularly by data centres and electric boiler projects.

Municipal leaders who have approved data centres and energy-sector operators see rising consumption as a positive development because it would increase renewable energy production and accelerate the green transition. In practice, this would mean building more wind and solar power facilities.

However, the researchers said electricity consumption cannot continue increasing indefinitely, even when the electricity is produced from renewable sources. They argued that green electricity should instead be directed towards fossil-fuel-dependent industries where it can reduce emissions most effectively.

Renewable energy threatens biodiversity

Anne Tolvanen, a forest ecology professor at the Natural Resources Institute Finland, has studied the land-use impacts of energy production. She is sceptical that increasing energy consumption would sustainably lead to more green electricity production.

Tolvanen said that wind and solar power facilities, as well as the transmission lines needed to deliver electricity, often replace undeveloped nature. This reduces biodiversity.

Wind power construction increases forest loss and fragments animal habitats, according to Tolvanen. Electricity lines and the roads needed to maintain them can require even more land than the wind turbines themselves.

Solar power facilities require more land than wind farms. Tolvanen said it was positive that solar facilities were being built, for example, on former peat production sites. But if this requires drainage, it can harm the condition of lakes when water containing nutrients and humus causes them to become more eutrophic and darker.

Tolvanen said it was preferable to build data centres and power facilities in areas where nature had already deteriorated and where construction or other land use was already present.

Research into the environmental impacts of data centres and renewable electricity production has not yet been sufficiently extensive, Tolvanen said.

“I would ask whether any development is sustainable if it is based on continuously increasing production or electricity consumption. Even if that electricity were green and produced with wind and solar power,” she said.

Green electricity should target emissions cuts

Jyri Seppälä, chair of the Finnish Climate Change Panel and a professor at the Finnish Environment Institute, said reserving green electricity for data centres did not constitute a green transition.

In his view, renewable electricity capacity should be directed towards industries where it would achieve the greatest emissions reductions.

Seppälä stressed that the green transition requires clean, renewable energy. It should be used where emissions cuts are as large as possible and where the resulting environmental harm can be justified.

“In Finland, the focus has continuously been too much on energy production. We should also look more closely at energy efficiency and saving energy, and make the whole system work better through that,” Seppälä said.

Tolvanen said the spread of data centres was such a recent phenomenon that research into their environmental impacts had fallen behind. She described the combination of growing data centre demand and new renewable energy production as difficult to reconcile with environmental sustainability.