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Danish Data Center Heats a Town, Vestas Breaks UK Record

A Danish data center will heat a town with its waste heat, Sumitomo buys into Celtic Sea floating wind, and Cadeler orders two more vessels.

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Good Monday everyone.

A data center broke ground in Denmark this week … and the plan is for it to help heat the town. Not a slogan. But a pipe. Let me explain.

The project is called Dansk Data Center 1. They put shovels in the ground on August thirteenth at the Port of Esbjerg in southern Denmark. The owners are the pension fund PensionDanmark … the real estate firm Thylander … and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners. That last name should sound familiar. Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners has raised about forty-three billion euros across fifteen funds … and builds energy projects in more than thirty countries. This time it is building a data center.

Eleven and a half megawatts. By the standards of this business … that is small. But watch how they built 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 that 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 twenty twenty-seven.

Now … hold that model in your head. Because on the other side of the world … they are still doing it the old way.

Centuria Industrial is a warehouse landlord. Australia’s largest pure-play industrial property trust. This week … in its full-year results … it told investors it is chasing more than two hundred and fifty megawatts of data center capacity.

Some of that is expansion at sites it already owns. A twelve-megawatt building in Melbourne bought from Telstra back in twenty twenty. A small center in Toowoomba, Queensland. Another in Perth … leased to 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. Power applications. Because in this business … the grid connection is the product. Centuria’s head of funds management says Australian demand is now outpacing supply. He is not wrong. And he is not alone.

So … two continents. Two data center stories. One built as a part of the power system. The other waiting in line for it. Either way … the load is coming. Which brings us to the people building the supply.

Start in the Celtic Sea … about forty kilometers off the British coast. There is a floating wind project out there called Gwynt Glas. That is Welsh for blue wind. Up to one and a half gigawatts. This 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 … Sumitomo has been investing in European offshore wind since twenty fourteen. 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 twenty twenty-eight. Commercial operation is targeted for the late twenty thirties. That is a Japanese trading house writing a check today for electricity that shows up in fifteen years.

The deal sits under a memorandum signed with the British government last year. Britain wants the Celtic Sea built. Japan just volunteered to help 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 Ayrshire. The machine comes off the EnVentus platform … a bigger rotor married to a higher-rated generator. More energy out of the same wind. That project spent ten years in planning. And Vestas has more than six hundred 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 the Netherlands … you cannot get a blade that size under a bridge or through a village. Scotland is empty enough to try it.

Britain now has about thirty-three gigawatts of wind … split about evenly between onshore and offshore. Onshore space is running out. So every new turbine has to do more work than the one before it.

And then … there are the ships. Cadeler runs the largest fleet of jack-up wind turbine installation vessels in the world. This week … it ordered two more. The yard is COSCO Shipping Offshore in Qidong, China. The price … about eight hundred and five million euros. Call it nine hundred and thirty million dollars. Delivery … twenty thirty and twenty thirty-one. That will bring the fleet to fourteen vessels.

And understand what these things are. The current class carries a deck of five thousand six hundred square meters … a payload over eighteen thousand tonnes … and a crane that lifts more than three thousand three hundred tonnes. Six extra-large monopile foundations per trip. The new class … they say … will be bigger still.

Meanwhile the newest ship … the Wind Ace … is finishing commissioning right now. Its first job is East Anglia Two for ScottishPower Renewables … starting in twenty twenty-seven.

And here is the number that tells you the most. Cadeler’s order backlog stands above three billion dollars. Eighty-two percent of that work is on projects where the customer has already taken a final investment decision. Nobody orders a nine-hundred-million-dollar ship for twenty thirty-one on a hunch.

So … here is what to watch. For years this industry has fought one bottleneck at a time. Permits. Then supply chain. Then vessels. Now the bottleneck is the grid connection itself. Centuria filed power applications before planning applications. Because in twenty twenty-six … the scarce resource is not land or steel or capital. It is a slot on the transmission network.

That changes the game for wind developers. The projects that win will not be the ones with the biggest turbines or the cheapest blades. They will be the ones that show up with a grid solution already in hand. Denmark just showed what that looks like. A data center that flexes its load … feeds heat back to the community … and makes the grid operator’s job easier.

If you are developing a wind farm today … and you are not thinking about who will consume your electrons and how … you are already behind. The old pitch was … we generate clean power. The new pitch is … we solve a grid problem. That is the difference between a project that gets built and one that sits in a queue for five years.

And that is the state of the wind industry for the 18th of August … twenty twenty-six. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast tomorrow.

Danish Data Center Heats a Town, Vestas Breaks UK Record

The following is simply raw speculation on my part.  I’ll be interested in your comments.

There are musical styles that align themselves with left- and right-wing politics, though none of these, with the possible exception of one, has 100% of its audience–more on this below.

Here are a few musical genre, where they seem to be pro- or anti-Trump. and why:

Classical.  Largely but not exclusively anti-Trump.  Classical appeals to the mind and the emotions that surround the perception of beauty.  There are exceptions, in that there are plenty of billionaires and weirdo intellectuals, e.g., the “objectivists” of Ayn Rand fame many of whom adore classical music.

Country.  Pro-Trump.  Most of it appeals to people whose most nuanced thinking is getting drunk and laid.  Preferably at the same time.

HipHop: Pro-Trump.  The opposite of classical, this is music that appeals to the genitalia as opposed to the mind.

Rock.  Mixed bag.  Heavy metal probably favors Trump; prog-rock fans of bands like Yes and Pink Floyd have too much going on in their minds and hearts to be Trump supporters.

Folk: Mostly anti-Trump.  Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan fans aren’t big fans of stupidity and fascism.  I’m sure there are exceptions.

Reggae: Distinctly anti-Trump.  Black folks’ songs of love, peace, weed, and escape from enslavement aren’t going to resonate with the hate of the White supremacists.

The Grateful Dead.  I’ll leave you with this.  If you can find me a single Dead Head Trumper, I’ll be astounded.  Now, I know that essentially no one sits on the fence about the Dead, but there is essentially zero intersection of Dead Heads and those who favor war, corruption, hate, greed, and ignorance.

Preferences for Musical Genre and Political Demographics

Religious statements fly in the teeth of science, but even the most ardent believers in God are going to have trouble with the meme here.

The reason men have nipples is that their gender isn’t assigned until about six weeks after conception, when chromosomes trigger hormonal changes that differentiate male and female anatomy.

Did God Assign Your Gender?