Interesting they’re talking about colocating it in EEA countries. I see the rationale for Iceland and Norway, but why specify them as EEA? Is there a post-Brexit strategic angle to this? (considering the large sum of public money involved)
How would you phrase that part of the article if indeed any EEA country could be the location of the new computer, and you wanted to include Iceland and Norway as two candidate countries?
Other more political thoughts are:
Southern Europe looks like Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece. Perhaps Iceland and Norway seem more politically stable?
And maybe this will mend some fences with Iceland after the UK seized it’s banks assets under the terrorism act (although that’s going back a little bit now).
Edit: Typo
Assuming that "clean" really means "low carbon", then only majority nuclear/hydro/geothermal electricity grids can currently achieve that. Wind/solar on the other hand are intermittent, and always need to be complemented with "dispatchable" energy sources to handle the base load.
That can either be hydro/geothermal if you were blessed with the right geography (like Iceland or Sweden), nuclear if you weren't but are pragmatic about it (like France), or coal/gas if you got scared of nuclear but still have a large country to power (like Germany).
I'm stressing the latter because, even as Germany is rightfully praised as a renewables champion that invested billions to be 70% wind/solar powered on a very good day, that's all in vain when it comes to climate change : coal/gas is so bad that their average carbon intensity of electricity production is still mediocre (see http://electricitymap.org/)
So, renewables doesn't always mean low carbon. If that's the primary concern for the location, France is probably their best bet (nearly as low carbon intensity as Iceland, and much closer to the UK)
I've seen people claim here that battery storage already represents a good solution to that problem. Elon Musk's battery storage project in Australia seems to be successful and powering a supercomputer would probably require a much smaller installation.