Science Blog
Summary
Almost all the electricity a data center pulls off the grid comes back out as heat. One overview of the field puts the figure at roughly 90%. A data center is, in effect, a very expensive radiator. But most of that warmth goes nowhere useful. It gets blown into the sky.
Cooling is where the energy disappears. The Environmental and Energy Study Institute estimates that about 40% of the energy a data center uses goes to keeping the servers cool, and nearly all of that ends up as heat.
The catch is temperature. Server exhaust comes off warm but not hot, and warm-but-not-hot isn’t much good to anyone who wants to heat a building. The low temperature of that waste heat limits its direct use, so it has to be raised before it can heat homes. Which is where Odense gets clever.
The method is less exotic than it sounds. Water from the city’s district-heating network is run through the data center’s cooling units, where it picks up the low warmth coming off the servers. It then travels to a nearby plant full of heat pumps, which lift the temperature the rest of the way before the water goes out to homes.
The engineering consultancy Ramboll, which designed the recovery system for the district-heating company Fjernvarme Fyn, says the ammonia heat pumps raise the water to 70 to 75°C, hot enough for radiators, before it enters the network.
Continue Reading
#MemberNewsIDEA#Ramboll#DistrictHeating#DataCenter