Summary
- Citylink’s Wrocław Stadion data centre is a 24MW facility under construction, with Nokia expected to be its primary user.
- The development is being designed to recover server heat for Wrocław’s municipal district-heating network.
- Citylink and Kogeneracja still need to define the technical system, economics, delivery timetable, and operating arrangements.
Citylink is developing a heat-recovery system for its 24MW Wrocław Stadion data centre, with plans to supply recovered server heat into the Polish city’s district-heating network.
The facility, on Szczecińska Street, is under construction and is expected to be used primarily by Nokia for research and development work around broadband data transmission technologies. Citylink has confirmed that heat recovery was considered during the design of the facility rather than being treated as a later retrofit.
Citylink signed a letter of intent on 28 July with Zespół Elektrociepłowni Wrocławskich Kogeneracja, part of PGE Energia Ciepła, covering work on the recovery and supply of waste heat. Citylink announced the agreement on 3 August, while fresh reporting on 7 August added confirmation that the technical solution remains in design and development.
The project remains at the design and development stage. Citylink has not yet given a cost, construction timetable for the heat-recovery system, or a date when recovered thermal energy could begin entering Wrocław’s heating network.
Heat reuse moves into facility design
Those unanswered questions are substantial. Recovering heat from servers is only the first part of a usable district-heating system. The temperature at which heat leaves the data centre, the need for heat pumps, the distance to suitable network infrastructure, the operating profile of the facility, and the commercial arrangement between the data-centre owner and heat-network operator all affect whether the system works economically.
Building the recovery route into the data centre from the design stage removes at least one obstacle. Pipework, heat exchangers, plant space, controls, and the interface with the cooling system can be planned alongside the core facility rather than introduced after the building is operating.
It also links the cooling architecture more directly to a second piece of infrastructure outside the site boundary. The data centre has to reject heat continuously when IT load is running; a district-heating network has a seasonal demand profile and different temperature requirements. Engineering the connection therefore requires more than identifying an available source of waste heat.
Wrocław is already emerging as a test bed for that integration. DataCentral reported in July that Wrocław University of Science and Technology and Kogeneracja were exploring another data-centre heat-reuse scheme for the municipal network. Citylink’s project adds a commercial facility to that picture.
The Polish development also reflects a wider European shift in how heat reuse is treated. Large data centres are increasingly being asked to demonstrate what happens to their thermal output, particularly where district-heating networks are already established and new facilities are competing for electricity, land, and local acceptance.
The practical constraint is that heat cannot be transported and sold as easily as electricity. A data centre beside a suitable heat network may have a realistic reuse route; an otherwise identical facility several kilometres from useful demand may not. Local infrastructure therefore determines whether waste heat becomes a revenue or efficiency opportunity, or remains energy that simply has to be rejected to the environment.
For Citylink, the next material step will be moving from the letter of intent to a defined technical and commercial system. That will establish how much of the 24MW facility’s thermal output can actually be recovered, at what temperature, and under what operating conditions it can be absorbed by Wrocław’s district-heating network.
