Danish Data Center Heats a Town, Vestas Breaks UK Record

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Welcome to Uptime News Flash, Industry News, Lightning Fast. Your host, Allen Hall, shares the renewable industry news you may have missed.

**Allen Hall** (0:15)
Good Monday, everyone. A data center broke ground in Denmark this past week, and the plan is for it to help heat the town. It's not a slogan, but it's a pipe. Let me explain. The project is called Dansk Data Center 1 They put shovels in the ground on August 13th at the Port of Esbjerg in southern Denmark. The owners are the pension fund, Pension Denmark, the real estate firm, Thylander, and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners. That last name should sound familiar. Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners has raised about 43 billion euros across 15 funds and builds energy projects in more than 30 countries. But this time, it's building a data center. It's 11.5 megawatts, so it's not huge. But by the standards of this business, too, it's also a pretty small investment. But watch how they build it. The waste heat will go into the town's district heating system in partnership with the local utility Din Forsyning. The cooling water runs in a closed loop and gets used again. And the plant can raise or lower its power draw to match whatever the Danish grid has to spare at that particular hour. The chief technology officer put it plainly, the goal is for the data center not to be a burden, but an active part of a balanced energy system. Commissioning is set for October of 2027 Now hold that model in your head because on the other side of the world, they're still doing it the old way. Centuria Industrial is a warehouse land hoard. Australia's largest pure play industrial property trust. In its past week and its full year results, it told investors it is chasing more than 250 megawatts of data center capacity. Now some of that expansion is at sites it already owns. A 12 megawatt building in Melbourne, bought by Telstra back in 2020, a small center in Toowoomba, Queensland, another in Perth, leased by Fujitsu. But the rest of that plan is warehouses, old industrial yards in Victoria and Western Australia. That Centuria wants to turn into data halls.
And here is the tell for three of those sites, the company has already filed power applications, not planning applications, but power application. Because the business, it's all about connection to the grid. That's the product. Centuria's head of Funds Management says, Australian demand is now outpacing supply. And he's not wrong. And he's not alone. So on two continents, there's two data center stories. One built as part of a power system, the other waiting in line for it. Either way, the load is coming, which brings us to the people building the energy supply. Let's start in the Celtic Sea, about 40 kilometers off the British coast. There's a floating wind project out there called Gwynt Glas.
That is Welsh for blue wind. Up to one and a half gigawatts. This past week, Japan's Sumitomo Corporation bought a third of it. The other two thirds are held by EDF and by Ireland's Electricity Supply Board. Three equal partners now. Now, Sumitomo has been investing in European offshore wind since about 2014
But this is its first floating project anywhere in the world. And the timeline will test your patience. Consent applications do not even begin until 2028 Commercial operation is targeted for late 2030s.
That is a Japanese trading house writing a check today for electricity that shows up in about 15 years.
The deal sits under a memorandum signed with the British government last year. And Britain wants the Celtic Sea built. And Japan just helped volunteer to pay for it.
Now up to Scotland, Vestas has installed the most powerful onshore wind turbine in Britain. It stands at Sanquhar II between Dumfries and Galloway and East Asia. The machine comes off the EnVentus platform, a bigger rotor married to a high rated generator. More energy out of the same wind. Now that project has spent 10 years in planning and Vestas has more than 600 megawatts of these machines under construction across Britain.
But here is the argument going on inside the industry. Everybody is building bigger turbines. And yet a Vestas executive said this week, quote, we firmly believe bigger does not automatically mean better. Project economics are under pressure. In Germany and in the Netherlands, you cannot get a blade that size under a bridge or through a village. Scotland is really empty enough to try it. Britain has now about 33 gigawatts of wind split evenly between onshore and offshore. But onshore looks to be running out of space. So every new turbine that has more work to do than the one before it. And then there are the ships. Cadeler runs the largest fleet of jackup wind turbine installation vessels in the world. And this past week, it ordered two more. The art is COSCO Shipping Offshore in Chidong, China. The price about 805 million euros.