Anyone who has enjoyed their gaming computer in the middle of summer knows they need a fan or air conditioner nearby to get rid of the extra heat in the room, but what about data centers? These titans generate a lot of heat, and the idea of recovering that wasted energy is very interesting. In fact, there are already several projects with this goal around the world, which send hot water from servers to heating networks…
In 2011, Google recycled an old paper mill in the community of Hamina, converting it into a data center that uses seawater for cooling. Following a similar path, Microsoft presented Project Natick, an initiative to submerge data centers in the sea. Its second phase concluded in July 2020, and the results were very positive.
However, the only thing achieved in both cases is eliminating heat or minimizing its impact. With data centers ever larger and more energy-demanding, the idea of recovering and reusing that heat becomes more attractive, especially in regions with adverse climatic conditions.
Server Heat, Home Heating?
As expected, what seems like an efficiency problem on the surface has already acquired a political profile in the background. Rising energy tariffs in Europe lead to more pressure from authorities for companies to accelerate their heat recovery projects, but that also requires new negotiations.
For example, data centers in Stockholm receive compensation for the excess heat they generate, and providers send them cold water to assist with cooling. On the other hand, Denmark decided to eliminate taxes on data centers that generated too much heat, with the aim of stimulating their distribution. And in the case of Germany, there is already a law that establishes a base reuse of 40 percent of the heat generated for all data centers built from 2027. Opponents of that law say it is impossible to comply with.
Logically, the challenges are gigantic. On the one hand, adequate infrastructure is needed for this excess heat to be used efficiently, and on the other, the truth is that water does not come out so hot from servers, oscillating between 26 and 28 degrees Celsius. In any case, calculations suggest that 10 megawatts could heat around 20,000 homes, and as the number of cloud services and artificial intelligence projects with high computational demands continue to multiply, the desire to create more efficient data centers is not going anywhere.
