The Seattle Times
Summary
The Seattle City Council unanimously passed an emergency freeze on siting new large data centers on June 9, paired with a policy framework directing the city to study what these facilities would mean for the grid, water, utility rates, land use, jobs and public health. All the right subjects, but one is missing, and it happens to be the one where Seattle is better-positioned than any city in the country.
A few blocks from where the council voted, Amazon’s Doppler tower is heated by the data center across the street: The Westin Building Exchange, a carrier hotel housing more than 250 telecom and internet companies, pipes up to 5 megawatts of waste heat under the street to Amazon’s campus instead of venting it from rooftop cooling towers. The system recovers about 4 million kilowatt-hours a year and delivers heat roughly four times more efficiently than burning gas, and the city of Seattle was a partner in building it. The national demonstration project for data center heat reuse is not in Helsinki, it’s at Seventh Avenue and Lenora Street.
Helsinki still matters because it shows that thermal waste reuse scales. Microsoft’s facilities there deliver up to 350 megawatts of thermal output into the city’s district heating network, covering 40% of heating demand for 250,000 customers. Stockholm, Sweden, pays operators for their heat, pulling recovered warmth from more than 20 facilities into a grid that warms roughly 30,000 apartments. The delivery mechanism in both cities is district energy, a shared network of heat pipes under the streets.
Seattle already has similar existing infrastructure. Founded as Seattle Steam in 1893, now operated as CenTrio, the downtown district energy system runs 18 miles of pipe serving more than 150 buildings from the retail core to the hospitals on First Hill. Server heat is low-grade, and the legacy loop runs hot, so connecting the two requires heat-pump plants of the kind Stockholm operates at scale. That is an engineering project, and a known one, on a network that is already under decarbonization pressure and already looking for cleaner inputs than combustion.
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