If you've ever played on a gaming PC in a small room, you know that electronics spit
out a ton of heat, but what if it wasn't going to waste and you could actually use
it to heat the rest of your house? Sounds like a great idea, especially with how high heating bills have gotten in many
parts of the world. It turns out there are places that do this on a large scale, so forget about sticking
your computer in your bedroom and just running Furmark on a cold night.
I'm talking about huge data centers which generate so much waste heat that they can
heat thousands of homes. Although projects like this can be found worldwide, they're perhaps most common in northern Europe,
which makes sense as Scandinavia isn't exactly known for warm beaches.
Good people, though. The general way this works is that cold water is pumped into data centers to cool the air
surrounding the server racks. This can be done in several ways, but it's common to see hot air from the servers forced
through the chilled water with a fan. As a result, the water warms up and leaves the facility, but instead of going to some
sewer somewhere, it goes to the city's heating grid.
In parts of Scandinavia, homes are heated with water-filled radiators, meaning that
this warm water can just be pumped directly into them from the central system and returned
to the grid afterward to be heated up again. In fact, because data centers generate so much waste heat, the EU is considering bringing
in a regulation that would require excess heat recovery from data centers that use more
than 1 megawatt of power. It remains to be seen whether this will indeed end up being a Europe-wide requirement, but
countries are already using other means to get the companies that run data centers to
do something worthwhile with their waste heat. As is the case with most projects involving a business doing something for the common
good, waste heat reclamation isn't something corporations are doing solely out of the kindness
of their hearts. For example, data centers in Stockholm get compensated for the waste heat they sell and
the local energy provider actually gives them chilled water to cool things off with in the
first place. Meanwhile, in Denmark, the government has gotten rid of a pre-existing tax on data centers
that generate excessive amounts of heat to incentivize them to instead make a lot of heat
and then distribute that waste heat back to the grid.
And in Germany, a law is already in place that requires a full 40% of waste heat to be reused
for data centers that open in 2027 or later.
But exactly how impactful will these programs and requirements be?
Well, there are some pros and cons to heating actual homes this way.
You need the right infrastructure to support an actual heating grid, which would be alongside
your other things like municipal electrical grids. Additionally, the waste heat that comes out of the data centers usually isn't all that
hot. Sometimes it's as low as 80 degrees Fahrenheit, meaning that more energy sometimes needs to
be added to get it up to the temperature needed for heating buildings.
And even then, it still may not be warm enough to heat anything other than homes.
That being said, the actual number of homes this technology could benefit is significant.
You can actually heat around 20,000 average apartments with only 10 megawatts of power.
To put this into more concrete terms, one single data park in Stockholm expects to be
able to heat one-tenth of the entire city of Stockholm by 2035.
And although Northern Europe seems to be leading the way in this trend, we're seeing similar
projects in the US, Canada, France, the UK, and Switzerland.
So as our reliance on cloud computing and AI grows, more and more people may find it
easier and cheaper than ever to stay warm in winter, though that doesn't really say
much about the other consequences we might face.
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