Finnish push for data center flexibility

Type: News Repost

Green energy parks combining renewables grid supply with onsite generation, energy storage and energy management software can enable data centers to participate positively in the energy market. Seppo Ihalianen told pv magazine how Finland’s ecogrid.energy is implementing this…

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Optimization software, onsite renewables (green energy parks) and tailored design models are some of the demand-side response ideas being tested out on data centers. Finnish founder and executive director Seppo Ihalainen believes in a combination of all the above approaches – and that’s why he founded ecogrid.energy.

Headquartered in Pori, Finland, the early-stage company’s business model has three main strands, each addressing a different part of the data center grid interaction puzzle. Ecogrid is building its first green energy park in Pori with Norwegian data center developer ASP Data Centers who will own and run the 300 MW facility. Another larger design facility, the Raisio model, is planned to start construction in 2030.

Ecogrid designs the energy parks together with its engineering and construction partners. The energy park model combines renewables grid supply with onsite generation and energy storage, with a pathway to biogas, synthetic fuels and green hydrogen as they become commercially feasible, said Ihalainen.

The company has also developed a proprietary hybrid energy management software platform called EMOP which Ihalainen said acts as “the link between the energy market and the data center infrastructure.” The Pori energy park will be the first facility to deploy the EMOP system, which is currently optimized for the NordPool energy market.

“We are a young company evolving together with this project, although we have a long history of data centers and there are data centers in Finland using EMOP-like functionalities. We have been involved in their development,” the founder told pv magazine. Ihalainen and Ecogrid’s CEO, Antti Hänninen, are aiming to make the optimization software and green energy park combination a standard across all data center developments in the future where possible.

Ecogrid is actively looking to expand into other markets, and it has a subsidiary in Singapore focused on Southeast Asia. It is also providing advisory services to Chinese AI companies to help them with excess heat reuse.

According to Ihalainen, bringing EMOP to countries with more monopolized markets is challenging as it requires an open market, but he is confident that as more renewable energy is introduced on the system a traditionally monopolized market can “correct itself and become more open.” Besides Southeast Asia, Ecogrid is targeting Ireland. In fact, the idea for the Ecogrid model first came to Ihalainen two years ago when he was attending a data center industry forum in Ireland.

“There was a lot of conversations about data centers needing to be a power asset but at that point it was difficult to build data centers on the island because there was no power,” he recalled. He was referring to the moratorium on new grid connections for data centers in the Irish capital, Dublin, that was introduced in 2021 due to severe grid bottlenecks.

“And we started thinking, what would need to be done to change data center design and how they could be able to participate in the energy market,” said Ihalainen. The Irish data center moratorium was later lifted in Dec. 2025 and replaced with a policy allowing data centers to connect to the grid only if they prove they can provide 80% of their power needs with new onsite energy generation.

Tiered approach Meanwhile, Finland has a tiered approach whereby data centers that create value through energy market participation and district heating programs are favored first, followed by traditional hyperscalers that don’t generate much value for society but rely on external resources and are able to bring their own financing with them.

The lowest priority is the third category: data centers that use cheap electricity, draining the national grid and contributing nothing. Finland also removed electricity tax advantages for data centers, moving them from the lower industrial tariff to the higher electricity tax bracket. Finland’s grid is relatively easy to connect to compared to many other European markets.

Ihalainen said Finland’s energy system is also better prepared than Ireland’s was for more data center builds, with more than 95% fossil fuel-free. Ecogrid CEO Anti Hänninen said that while it’s important to incentivize what he called good data centers, introducing one uniform renewables mandate might not be the best way to do this.

Offering a special grid connection package for data centers on a tailored basis is better and would generate more competition among data center developers to meet renewables requirements in a way that works for everyone. Finland’s data center industry is not as big as Ireland’s, but it is growing fast and managing flexibility needs to happen now.

“It is justified to encourage and, if necessary, even require data centers to make use of flexibility,” Riku Huttunen, Director-General of the Energy Department at the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment in Finland wrote in May. “Market prices guide data centers to actively utilize their battery storages and reserve capacity – which they have built for securing server operations – to balance costs.

This incentive becomes more obvious when obtaining an affordable fixed-price electricity contract turns out to be increasingly difficult,” he added in a column outlining the Finnish government’s position. “The option of prioritizing operators planning to connect to the network based on objective criteria and within the framework of EU legislation should be assessed. The idea is to enable the operators with less network and electricity load to access the grid faster.

One particular criterion could be flexible electricity use.” Finland’s grid operator, Fingrid, requires data centers larger than 30 MW to be able to flex 30% of its consumption in real time. When Fingrid sends a time-sensitive signal to turn down by 30%, EMOP relays this to the operator to start their power production or switch off, depending on the model.

Source

• PV Magazine (2026-08-06)
• Original article: Finnish push for data center flexibility