Facilities Dive
Summary
The U.S. lags Europe and Canada on data center heat recovery, but the industry’s breakneck growth offers a significant opportunity for universities, companies, district energy providers and others.
Data center heat recovery is less common in the U.S., but a nearly 10-year-old system that supplies heat to Amazon’s downtown Seattle campus highlights the potential in campus or dense urban environments.
The practice is already common in Europe, where urban district energy systems plug into data centers to pull heat off servers and provide efficient climate control for homes, businesses and campuses, Rob Thornton, president and CEO of the International District Energy Association, said in an interview.
A district energy system serving a suburban commercial district near Toronto also tapped an Equinix data center to provide space heat to “multiple residential buildings and a nearby hotel, hospital and local shopping center” and year-round hot water to “multiple buildings” in the area, Equinix Senior Manager of Sustainability, Noah Nkonge wrote in a blog post last year.
The heat expelled by data center cooling systems is much lower-grade than the heat coming off gas-fired boilers, so it generally needs to be concentrated in chiller systems like Amazon’s and may not be useful for industrial processes that require higher temperatures.
But institutional users increasingly see the opportunity to tap data centers in a more efficient, multi-source energy mix. Thornton pointed to a University of Virginia research park’s plans for a highly efficient energy plant that would utilize waste heat from a new data center to achieve a modeled coefficient of performance of nearly nine — about nine times the efficiency of a modern gas-fired boiler and double that of a typical ground-source heat pump’s.
Data center developers and operators recognize the opportunity as well, particularly as grid constraints drive a push for onsite power generation at new facilities. It just makes sense to do something useful with all that heat, Nkonge said at the International District Energy Association’s annual conference earlier this month.
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