The current energy crisis poses serious challenges for energy companies and power plants. However the innovative solution of the Hungarian Enerhash’s offers the opportunity to increase efficiency by exploiting synergies in the energy sector and the data center market. Enerhash Technologies PLC., an energy technology company, has received a private investment of more than 6.5 million EUR for infrastructure development and data center investment, that resulted in an Enerhash data center increasing the efficiency of the Arctic Circle power plants of a Swedish state-owned energy company. The successful implementation opens up the possibility for further Swedish collaborations, the tech company plans to raise additional investor capital.
The Hungarian Enerhash Technologies PLC. aims to carry out infrastructure development as well as data center investments to make valuable use of the reserve capacities of energy producers. The energy tech company has recently raised more than 6.5 million EUR in private equity capital for infrastructure development and server hardware procurement. This has led to large-scale cooperation with a major state-owned energy company in Sweden and paved the way for further cooperation in the central region of the country.
They can use the world’s cheapest electricity is available at the Arctic Circle
The Swedish energy company has 79 power plants in Sweden, most of them in the Arctic Circle. Due to the very low population density of the vast northern regions, there is a small uptake market and low electricity consumption in the area, creating overcapacity. This results in extremely low electricity prices: in many cases, 1 MWh of electricity costs as little as €1 in the region, while it is not uncommon to pay 500 times as much for the same amount in our country.
“As part of a major milestone investment in Sweden, we have installed a 3 MW data center in the northern region of Sweden to utilize the spare capacity of hydroelectric power plants. We provide balancing service on the power grid for the state energy company, and the hydroelectric power plants supply the data center with electricity, which we use without emissions and sell as computing capacity – for example, for bitcoin mining,”
says Jogg Dániel, co-founder of Enerhash, explaining the details of the investment in northern Sweden.
Due to the geographical features of Sweden, the energy mix is heavily dominated by hydropower. However, resulting from the characteristics of renewable energy production, imbalances in production are common – overproduction in the case of hydro and wind power in northern Sweden.
This electricity is used by the innovation developed by Enerhash. High-tech Enerhash data centers installed directly next to power plants are able to continuously use the electricity generated by the power plants. This gives the power plants a stable source of revenue, while at the same time they can switch off the data centers with a touch of a button and feed the electricity into the grid. The electricity produced by surplus generation is converted by data centers into computing capacity, that can be utilized in areas such as artificial intelligence, visualization, modeling or even blockchain.
“The Arctic region of the country currently has the cheapest electricity in the world due to underconsumption, as the region’s power plants, that are continuously connected to the grid, have excess capacity and overproduction of 100% renewable hydropower. The cooperation with the state-owned energy company in the Arctic Circle guarantees electricity prices below €30-40/MWh in the long term, which means stability and predictability.”
explains Jogg Balázs, another co-founder of the tech company, who added that they are preparing to install another data center in central Sweden, for which the tech company plans to raise additional investor capital.
