Research, development, and education: laying foundations for Arctic and Northern data centers

After Google opened its data center in Hamina, Finland in 2011 and Facebook established its data center in Luleå in 2013, the regional governments in northern Sweden recognized a need for — and created — a coordinated data center industry strategy. Completed in 2014, this document proposed, among other things, that northern Sweden should place emphasis on and invest in the development of data center-related research and education. Today, the Luleå–Boden–Piteå region forms a globally recognized data center cluster, and it hosts RISE ICE Datacenter, which is one of the leading data center research and innovation facilities in Europe. Therefore, it is clear that data center-related expertise has successfully been added to the local and regional skillset. They are seen as a new type of mission-critical infrastructure, adding to the traditional mining, hydropower, pulp and paper, and steel industries that are located in the region, and they have strong backing from the research, development, and education conducted in local universities and research facilities.1

The strong regional technical know-how and availability of skilled staff has also been emphasized when Mo i Rana in northern Norway has marketed itself as a great location for data cen-ters.2 However, it is obvious that the Nordic countries’ success in attracting data center investments is not based only on their human capital. Rather, the abundant reserves of power and the low price of (often green) energy, together with a cold climate, a stable society, suitable fiberoptic connectivity, reasonable land prices, low risk of natural hazards, and low seismic activity, have played a significant role as well. Although great developments have taken place in various Arctic and Northern regions since the late 2000s and early 2010s when these characteristics were first recognized as assets, both the industry itself and its presence in the circumpolar north is not well known among the general public. Furthermore, despite the existence of national and regional data center policies, it can be argued that the rapidly growing industry, which consumes huge amounts of electricity has not received a sufficient amount of attention from decision-makers and researchers.

The aim of this article is two-fold. First, it attempts to increase awareness, knowledge, and understanding among all relevant national, regional, and local stakeholders concerning data centers, the data center industry, and its role in the Arctic and the North. The data centers have been described as a type of building that most distinctly embodies the 21st century culture, and they are [1, Varnelis K.], together with the global fiber-optic cable network, at the core of the so-called Society 5.0, where cyberspace and physical space are highly integrated. Therefore, questions concerning data centers may no longer belong only to the sphere of information and communications technology (ICT), as they could be considered a new type of basic infrastructure upon which society is dependent. Second, in order to demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of regional knowledge bases and skillsets, this study introduces data center research and education that was conducted in the Arctic and the North, as well as research concerning the past, current, and future development of the data center industry in the cold, northern environment.

Although a recent study has shown that data centers’ overall energy consumption has increased less than previously expected due to development of technology [8, Masanet E., Shehabi A., Lei N., Smith S., Koomey J.], it is an extremely energy-hungry business that does not seem to fit with energy-saving policies and goals to reduce carbon emissions. Therefore, the question of why many countries, regions, and cities try to attract data center investments through measures ranging from tax policies and supportive infrastructure construction to municipal zoning, helping with permits, and organizing communication with local contractors, may be a valid one. Besides approaching the answer from the viewpoint of employment and tax revenues, the rationale behind these attempts can also be found in the relative environmentally friendliness of data centers, especially those located in the North. Although data centers, which are facilities designed to enable concentrated and efficient usage of software and hardware in one place, consume vast amounts of energy, their consumption is still much less than it would be if the computing power/servers were distributed between various locations. In other words, significant savings in energy use can be achieved if a server running in a data center makes it possible to shut down a large number of other devices outside of the data centers [9, Peuhkuri M., Lääkkölä R., Costa-Requena J., Manner

The content of the studies and projects carried out in the Arctic and the North have often been connected with the prevailing conditions. In other words, while the cold climate, the presence of wide district heating networks 3, and the abundance of water and wind power resources may seem to be far from the core business, i.e. the storage of data, they have affected both the research into and the actual design of the data center facilities. Furthermore, the research concerning data centers have not started from scratch but rather been built on an existing knowledge base. The researchers involved in data center research, as well as the personnel who have started to work in the data centers, come from various backgrounds. The design and construction of the buildings require experts, for example from architecture and construction, fire protection, power distribution and energy systems, cooling, (fluid) mechanics, and automation. Meanwhile, the running and optimization of the data centers demand knowledge of embedded systems, cloud, software, big data, and so on. Some of the skillsets needed already existed in the northern regions, and it has been possible to recruit researchers from other fields and skilled labor from other industrial sectors 4.

When the data center industry emerged in Iceland, in particular on the Reykjanes Peninsula, as a new avenue for economic growth during the years following the collapse of the banking business in 2008, the cold climate and abundant renewable energy resources were identified as highly valuable assets. Similarly, Canada, which hosts various co-location data centers, has advertised its cheap energy, stable society, and data sovereignty (relevant when compared with the Patriot Act in the United States, which enables governmental access to data) when describing itself as a natu- ral fit for free-air cooling since the beginning of the 2010s 7.

Fig. 1. Examples of municipalities and regions hosting data centers.

Free-air cooling is not the only method that has been adopted in the Arctic and the North; Google, for example, utilizes sea water to cool its hyperscale data center in Hamina, Finland. However, in order to lower the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) ratio describing how efficiently a data center uses energy, free-air cooling has inspired various studies in the past decade. One article, published in 2011 by researchers from Aalto University and claiming to be the first research paper on data centers from Finland, concentrated on the air management and energy performance of the cooling system and paved the way for further studies to be conducted in this Helsinki-based university [13, Lu T., Lu X., Remes M., Viljanen M.].

RISE ICE Datacenter 8, the Infrastructure and cloud research and test environment in northern Sweden, was inaugurated in January 2016 with close proximity to the Luleå University of Technology. From the very beginning, initiatives to minimize energy consumption in data centers have belonged to its research portfolio. While the early projects, initiated in cooperation with the local university to develop new ways to utilize the air pressure differences within the data center in order to control the air flow and reduce the use of fans received funding from national and regional sources 9, the ongoing BodenTypeDC-project has earned awards, attracted attention in the media, and received funding through EU’s Horizon 2020 program. During the project, a highly efficient prototype data center with low PUE (reportedly as low as 1.007) was built and tested. The data center, located in the city of Boden, uses only renewable power and advanced cooling technologies 10.

Different types of Data centers 11

Table 1

Hyperscale DC	Facilities above 20 MW. Owned and operated by the company it supports. Offer robust, scalable applications and storage portfolio of services. Normally located close to the power grid in areas with power abundance. Has typically more than 500 Cabinets (minimum of 5,000 servers) and is at least 10,000 sq. ft. in size.
Enterprise DC	Owned and operated by the company it supports and often built on-site. May use external companies for initial fit-outs and network installation before being maintained internally. Has more than 10 Cabinets and can be as large as 40MW.
Co-location DC	Data center owner selling space, power, and cooling to multiple enterprise, cloud, and hyperscale customers in a specific location. Offers interconnection to Software as a Service (SaaS) or Platform as a service (PaaS). Enables enterprises to grow with minimum complexity at a low cost. Customers can rent as many cabinets they need. Can house hundreds to thousands of individual customers.
Cloud	Facilities owned and operated by the cloud companies delivering the on-demand availability

of computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, to clients. Available to many users over the Internet. Large cloud providers build multi-site networks.

While PUE is clearly the best-known data center infrastructure metrics, it has been criticized as an imperfect measurement if one wants to describe overall energy efficiency. The PUE equation does not, for example, take into account how energy efficient the IT equipment is, and there is no globally agreed-upon standard to measure PUE. The emergence of new metrics, such as Energy Reuse Effectiveness (ERE) or Energy Reuse Factor (ERF), reflects recent developments in the data center industry and research. In other words, largely due to the greater attention being paid to the ecological footprint of the industry, questions concerning the collection and re-use of waste heat that is born inside data centers have attracted attention within both the industry and academia. Although the re-use of heat is studied in different parts of the world [15, Patterson, M.K., VanGeet O., Tschudi W., Azevedo D.; 16, Marcinichen J.B., Oliver J.A., Thome J.R.; 17, Ebrahimi K., Jones G. F., Fleischer A.S.; 18, Ebrahimi K., Jones G.F., Fleischer A.S.; 19, Davies F.F., Maidment G.G., Tozer R.M.] 13, the Nordic countries are considered to be the global forerunners in research and the pioneers in the actual utilization of data center waste heat 14. Therefore, they are well prepared if legislation either guides or forces the data center industry toward the re-use of heat in the future.

The utilization of the side streams of an industrial process is according to the widely supported principles of a circular economy; however, the waste heat that can be captured has problems as well. Most notably, the temperature of data center waste heat is often too low (30–40 degrees Celsius) to be used as-is in many applications and processes. However, this problem has been at least partially solved through the development of heat pump technology. Furthermore, the recovery of data center waste heat only makes sense technically if meaningful ways to utilize it are available. Economically, the re-use of data center waste heat is only reasonable if it is priced competitively against heating plants and waste heat flows from other industries. In the Nordic countries, for example, the high-quality (high-temperature) waste heat of the forest, chemical, and steel industries is already relatively widely utilized 15.

MAP 2: District heating plants in Finland, 1

Fig.2. Map 2: District heatingplants in Finland, 1 July 2015

The research on the re-use of heat can be divided roughly into two tracks. The first track includes research concentrating on the re-use of heat through the district heating system and has been conducted both in the RISE ICE Datacenter 16 and at Aalto University [20, Wahlroos M., Pärs-sinen M., Manner J., Syri S.; 12, Wahlroos M., Pärssinen M., Rinne S., Syri S., Manner J.; 21, Pärs-sinen M., Wahlroos M., Syri S., Manner J.]. These studies have often focused on attempts to increase the temperature of heat coming out of data centers. While heat pumps, which have often been at the core of such research, are already in use (for example, the Yandex data center in

Mäntsälä, Finland, sells its waste heat to the local energy company, utilizing heat pumps to reach 85 degrees Celsius), liquid cooling methods have also been tested for reaching higher temperature levels to make the use of data center waste heat in district heating more efficient. At the same time, attention has been paid to the efficiency of the heat pumps and the development of district heating networks, as the new networks will be better suited for the utilization of lower temperature waste heat. The research on these technologies have been accompanied with an economic investment assessment and studies analyzing business models and the district heating system level operational cost savings in the case data center waste heat is utilized. Map 2 uses Finland as an example to demonstrate the wide distribution of district heating systems (exceeding 15.000 kilometres and expanding) in the Nordic countries. The availability of the district heating network in different parts of the country makes decisions concerning the location of data centers more flexible.

The second track of research on the re-use of heat has concentrated on other applications in need of low-grade heat. Greenhouses, fish farms, and biomass drying are examples of potential activities that both academic researchers and data center businesses have paid attention to. While these applications might bring greater energy efficiency, as they would not demand the use of heat pumps, they are not without trouble. Most importantly, the utilization of the low-temperature waste heat demands that the interdependent facilities are located close to each oth-er.17 Although the limitations of the existing sites and question of business models acceptable to all parties may have hindered the development, there are already examples of synergetic cooperation between data centers and greenhouses 18.

One of the earliest projects in northern Sweden to recognize the growing amount of intermittent power sources and increased need for pro-active load and power balancing was launched in 2016 and aimed at data center operations with a local power supply of both solar panels and grid power. This study concentrated on the data center’s interaction with the grid power supply and examined possibilities to balance the power requirements. As an example, the project tested local thermal storages, such as whether chilled water could be produced when the electricity demand was low and used when the electricity demand was high 19. The succeeding projects in RISE ICE Datacenter have been aimed at electricity cost and peak loads reduction by studying how to optimize the operations for a data center with its own microgrid. Through the implementation of machine learning, optimal decisions were to be made after the forecasts for the temperature, solar radiation, electricity costs, and working load had been analyzed. Recently, these kinds of questions have also been studied in cooperation with partners from Central Europe 20.

The particularities of renewable energy and the need for flexible power reserves have been recognized in the industry. For example, the Aurora Datacenter, which is located in Oulu in northern Finland, has initiated a pilot project in cooperation with Eaton and Fortum to transfer their data center from a facility that demands power to a facility that can support the grid and generate revenue through this kind of activity. The data center that hosts two 3000 kilo lithium batteries and has its uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) connected to the national grid can make immediate adjustments in its power consumption and receive compensation from the transmission system operator 21 .

The capability to balance the demand and make adjustments if natural conditions become temporarily unfavorable for wind or solar power is not the only connection between data centers and renewable energy production. The data center operators with facilities in different parts of the world can control their energy consumption by producing the same services in different geographical locations at different times of day. This method, which allows data center companies to consume cheaper electricity during off-peak hours, can also be used to avoid regions where, due to the environmental conditions, the amount of renewable energy available is temporarily low. Furthermore, many data center companies, especially those that are consumer brands, already advertise that their data centers run with renewable energy, and the pressure toward an industrywide shift to green data centers is getting heavier. If the roots of this trend are studied, one runs into projects like the GreenStar Network project, which originated in Canada in 2010. The aim of the project, which focused on data centers built in proximity to green energy sources, was to provide cloud-based ICT services based entirely on renewable energy [23, Nguyen K. K., Cheriet M., Lemay M., Reijs V., Mackarel A., Pastrama A., pp. 2538–2539]. Nowadays, the data centers either purchase green energy from conventional producers or make direct investments in renewable energy.

Sakura Internet has established one of Japan’s largest data centers in Ishikari, Hokkaido and built its own solar power capacity. In addition, Kyocera Communication Systems, which is planning to build Japan’s first data center using 100 percent renewable energy in the same city, will invest in wind, solar, and biomass energy 22. While the high local price of electricity may partly explain these companies’ decisions to invest in own-energy production, examples of similar activity can also be found in other northern regions that are much closer to the Polar Circle and where energy is cheaper. An informant representing a data center in northern Finland pointed out that solar power is a good match for the data center industry. This is especially true in the North, where the number of annual sunlight hours can be relatively high, as the midnight sun in the summer compensates for the lack of sunny days during the winter, creating an annual balance that is a good fit for data centers, which have higher energy needs during the summer months due to a need for cooling 23. However, it is doubtful whether the data center giants, such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, or Microsoft, will take a positive stance toward regulation as is planned, for example, in Denmark, which would force them to build and operate powerplants serving their hyperscale data centers.

Studies describing the economic impact of northern data centers and their societal meaning

While the research concerning data centers have been conducted in various locations in the Circumpolar North, the data center industry, as well as the individual sites and facilities that exist in the region, have also inspired a number of studies. The reports and articles produced can be divided into two categories. The first consists of research concentrating on the data centers’ economic impacts and regional advantages and investment decisions. The papers representing the second category have typically been interested in the materiality of clouds/internet and approached data centers through the lenses of anthropology or media studies. These articles have been written in and published through academic institutions, but the studies falling into the first category have often been commissioned by private enterprises or public authorities and conducted by consultants.

The reports describing the overall economic impact of the hyperscale facilities that Google and Facebook have established in the Nordic countries are well-known examples of business and regional development-oriented studies. According to these reports, which were commissioned by the companies in question and carried out by international consulting companies, the investment decisions concerning hyperscale data centers are measured in hundreds of millions of euro, and they can create tax revenue and employment (directly and through subcontracting) for thousands of people. While the impact on local employment is the highest during the construction period, the cases studied have shown that this phase can continue for years as the companies continue investing in their selected sites 29.

Furthermore, several reports concentrating on the development of industry in general or on the (hypothetical or previous) arrival of hyperscale data centers into northern communities have been made, for example in Sweden and Norway, based on initiatives taken by national and regional authorities 30. Although competition between different countries attempting to attract data center investments is a reality, a report commissioned by the Nordic Council of Ministers is an example of intergovernmental cooperation. In describing the factors affecting site selection and the strengths of the Nordic region, the report seems to suggest that the markets are growing rapidly and opportunities are available for all countries involved 31. What this and other reports concerning the young industry often seem to miss is an analysis that covers the entire life cycle of the data centers. Although many data centers have been opened within facilities that were originally serving other types of heavy industry, hardly any attention has been paid to the question of what happens to the data center facilities when they eventually close.

The anthropological studies focusing on data centers in Sweden, Denmark, and Iceland have been conducted by researchers who are affiliated with universities both inside and outside of the Arctic and the North. This kind of research has typically included long-term field work, interviews, and participatory observation in northern communities that host large-scale data center facilities. The scholars have investigated the infrastructures that comprise cloud computing and thus challenged and problematized the myth of an immaterial or ethereal internet, which has been described as something appearing to be everywhere and nowhere in particular. These studies have described the cloud infrastructures’ philosophical, political, social, and environmental impacts, as well as the socio-technical assemblages that emerge in the course of infrastructuring processes. Some scholars have emphasized the influence of infrastructural inheritances and studied localization and integration in industrial landscapes. They have pointed out that many data centers have been built in the premises of other industries that are no longer functioning and shown how the new industrial activity becomes a part of state-making and regional identitybuilding processes. Finally, attention has also been paid to the lack of public engagement, as well as to the expectations and imaginings woven into data center projects that are often carried out in great secrecy [25, Vonderau A.; 6, Vonderau A.; 26, Johnson A.; 7, Hogan M., Vonderau A.; 27, Johnson A.; 28, Maguire J., Winthereik B.R.].

Challenges of educating and recruiting a competent workforce

While the lack of institutionalized university education in many places has led to the establishment of trainings provided by private companies and consultants 34, there are also examples of Arctic and northern higher educational institutes that offer formalized data center education and thesis supervision. In the Nordic countries, several MA and BA theses have already been completed in the already mentioned LTU and Aalto University 35 and in other universities 36. One thesis, completed at the Lappeenranta University of Technology, even played an important role in the creation of the Mäntsälä region’s successful policy aimed at attracting data center investments through the utilization of waste heat 37. Furthermore, South-Eastern Finland University of Applied Sciences (XAMK) and the Joint Authority of Education of Kotka-Hamina Region Group (Ekami), which are in close proximity to Google’s hyperscale data center in Hamina, have offered study modules and programs concentrating specifically on data centers 38. The highly specialized data center cluster in the city of Kajaani is also an interesting case, both because of the strong presence of the public sector and because of the investments made in the development of the data center-related education.

The origins of these activities go back to 2012 when the IT Center for Science (CSC), which is owned by the Finnish state, and higher education institutions established a data center and supercomputer, and Herman IT, a locally owned private enterprise, opened its data center in the Renforsin Ranta business park. Despite Kajaani’s early success owed to the business park, which had been set up on the former premises of a paper mill that offered ready-made facilities, great amounts of power, and fiber-connectivity, the attempts to attract further (private) data center investments and anchor clients failed in the succeeding years. However, this did not lessen the region’s commitment to the development of data center-relevant skillsets that took form in the education offered by the local University of Applied Sciences. This data center specialization program has provided students with skills related to the key server and workstation products and modern organizational network solutions. During their training, the students of the Kajaani University of Applied Sciences have been able to work in their own data center training facility, the DC lab, and attempts have been made to widen the ecosystem around the data centers, for example, in the direction of data analytics. Another big step was taken in 2019 when it was announced that the CSC datacenter in Kajaani had been selected to host a pan-European high-performance supercomputer supported by the European countries and the European Union. The supercomputer is expected to start operations in 2020, after which the waste heat produced in the data center will contribute up to 20 percent of the district heating needs of the region 39.

While the possibilities of the re-use of heat produced by supercomputers have also been realized elsewhere, such as at the University of Tromsø (UiT) the Arctic University of Norway 40, informants representing private enterprises have pointed out that some of the Arctic universities that seem to have had opportunities to develop a data center-related education have failed to do so due to a lack of vision and leadership. In the meantime, the data center industry has organized, and the national data center associations in Sweden, Finland, and Denmark have emphasized the importance of education and training in their activities. The practical methods for reaching the set objectives have ranged from seminars in which students can participate to networking, exchange of information, and cooperation with the public sector and institutes of higher education 41.

Conclusion

Currently, most of the data center clusters utilizing the cold climate are located on the outskirts of the Arctic or in sub-Arctic areas. In Russia, for example, the data center industry is heavily concentrated, both in terms of market share (the top three companies have 42 percent of the market) and spatial distribution favoring southern locations (65–70 percent of all data center racks are in Moscow, and a further 15–18 percent are in St. Petersburg). The Russian market is, however, developing rapidly, and growth is expected outside of the traditional focus regions. Therefore, the peripheral Russian areas, some of which already host large-scale cryptocurrency mining activities, that can offer both a cold climate and one of the cheapest forms of electricity in the world may be potential locations for data centers as well 42. Meanwhile, Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver have dominated the data center markets in Canada 43. The submarine fiber-optic cables projects, most notably the Arctic Connect and that of the Alaska-based company Quintillion, aiming at the improvement of international connectivity in and through the Arctic may, however, alter this situation in the future. Regional development plans in Alaska have referred to the importance of improved connectivity, and cities such as Rovaniemi and Kirkenes have directly invested in the Arctic Connect project, materialization of which is hoped to bring data center investments. The fiberoptic cables form the backbone of international communication, and the planned cables would surely cause a huge change in the Arctic regions’ strategic position within the global flow of information [29, Saunavaara J.]. However, they would not be the only factor considered by companies that are choosing locations for new data centers.

Many of the Arctic and northern areas, which may soon see their international connectivity problems largely solved, may also lack human capital and regional skillsets that are clearly factors affecting site selection and the potential development of a data center cluster. Therefore, despite the inter-sectoral worker mobility may help in regions that have hosted other types of industrial activity, new investments in research and education may be needed. Otherwise, the skilled workers have to be brought into northern communities from outside. This may lead to recruitment problems, creation of different types of incentives increasing the personnel cost and challenging the competitiveness of remote areas, and to the underdevelopment of regional knowledge networks important for the cluster formation.

It is also worth emphasizing that the market-driven data center business is aimed at the maximation of profit. Therefore, the incentives affecting the return on investment, the total cost of ownership through the set-up, and long-term operational costs impact locational decisions. While the national regulations concerning the level of energy tax paid by data centers have played a significant role in the Nordic countries by defining their attractiveness when compared to one another, the competition between states and counties in the United States has led to generous incentives and aggressive promotional activities. The data center companies have thus been able to shop around with the potential hosting communities in the US. However, EU legislation has curbed the possibility for similar activity in Europe 44. Despite the competitive nature of business, the kind of cross-border research cooperation that has already taken place in the Nordic countries could help the small Arctic and Northern regional and national economies in competition against Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin, which are still hosting a great majority of data centers in Europe.

The rapid growth of the data center industry has already caused counter-reactions in some key areas in Central Europe. Amsterdam, for example, has temporarily banned the construction of new data centers, and other regions, such as Stockholm, face challenges with the capacity of their grid. Although these kinds of developments may strengthen the position of the energy-rich northern regions, the failure of, or at least significant delays in, previous large-scale data center projects that received a lot of publicity, such as the Kolos Data Center project in Ballangen, Norway and the Silent Partner Group’s gigantic plans including three sites in northern Finland 45, may cause suspicion toward the industry among local inhabitants and decision-makers. Furthermore, decisions concerning investments are always made by humans. Ken Baudry has used to term “server huggers” when referring to business leaders who want to have their IT equipment nearby in spite of being located in areas facing serious natural hazard risks [30, Baudry K., p. 99]. It can thus be argued that the future development of Arctic and northern data center business is not only connected with the measurable technical, economic, or environmental parameters, but it also depends on human perceptions and attitudes.

The concept of green IT, which, according to one definition, “denotes all activities and efforts incorporating ecologically friendly technologies and processes into the entire lifecycle of information and communication technology” [32, Hedwig M., Malkowski S., Neumann D., p. 2], guides in the taking of a long-term perspective with questions concerning the sustainability and carbon footprint of the data center industry. Although energy-related issues play a significant role, they are only a part of the package including also the materials used during both the construction and operative phases. Discussions concerning the efficiency, costs, and environmental friendliness of materials is relevant at all levels, whether the materials be for the computer components or are what will be used in the data center buildings. In this respect, the wooden data center constructed in Sweden 46 should be mentioned, as it is an example of cooperation between the emerging data center industry and the more traditional industries that utilize northern natural resources.

Finally, in order to make sense of the discussion concerning the sustainability of data centers and energy consumption, it should be emphasized that data centers are built to answer the demand originating from the growth of other businesses that utilize their services. The servers never run (and consume energy) without reason. While the pressure from legislators and consumers will most likely push the data centers to perform in more sustainable ways in the future, the initiatives carried out by the industry have already made the situation much better than it was, for example at the end of the 1990s. Back then, an article published in Forbes titled ‘Dig more coal — the PC’s are coming’ opened many peoples’ eyes to the connection between electronic equipment and energy consumption 47. However, the data center industry is not immune to a divergence in ways of understanding the meaning of ‘sustainable’ or ‘green’, or to the differences between the various Arctic and northern countries that affect the operational conditions of other industries as well. Therefore, the pressure and methods utilized to achieve greater energy efficiency will most likely continue to vary in the future, and there will be different opinions, such as those concerning the combined development of nuclear power and data centers 48.