New Data Center Will Heat Homes In London 204
1sockchuck writes "The heat generated by thousands of servers at the new Telehouse West data center in London will soon be used to heat nearby houses and businesses. The Greater London Authority has approved a plan in which waste heat from the colocation facility will be used in a district heat network for the local Docklands community. The project is expected to produce up to nine megawatts of power for the local community."
Hey now, control yourself... (Score:5, Funny)
You know, lavishing praise on a project like that is going to make all the other projects jealous.
The best part? (Score:5, Funny)
It'll work all year round! You'll never feel cold in July ever again, and you may not even need to use your oven to make a roast.
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Seriously, though, what will they do with the excess heat in summer time?
Re:The best part? (Score:5, Funny)
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Vent it outside? You know, like is done with every other air conditioning system in the world.
Re:The best part? (Score:5, Funny)
Seriously, though, what will they do with the excess heat in summer time?
This is the UK we are talking about. They don't really have a summer.
Humdity (Score:5, Insightful)
A few years back I went on my first trip to the UK (at the end of July) we had a 3 day stop over in Hong Kong on the way. Hong Kong was as unbearable as Darwin is in the wet season, 30-35 deg, no breeze and near 100% humidity. As we were approaching London the pilot announced the temprature in London had just broken it's record maximum temp ( 32degC IIRC ). The wife and I snickered at each other...the english have no idea what hot is... We stopped snickering as soon we walked out of the airport and hit a wall of warm humid air that was exactly like Hong Kong or Darwin, the only weather difference between the three places was the pollution levels.
Of course the reason for the discomfort [ec.gc.ca] is high humidity from the massive ocean currents that bring warm water from the Gulf of Mexico.
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London homes are also far less likely to be equipped with air conditioning than homes in Hong Kong or Australia, which is another reason for the discomfort.
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Not only lack of air conditioning but very different construction materials in the much older cities.
I live in the old town of Edinburgh myself, and the flat we're in retains heat at an amazing level. I'm not savvy on the exact materials used, but the stone is thick/dense enough to block out mobile phone signals the instant you step over the stairwell threshold. When its hot (25+ in Scotland :P) for more than a few days, the flat ends up being considerably hotter than the outside :/ If its left empty for a
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I visited London in 1996 during what was apparently a fairly punishing summer. I'm from Louisiana and would normally say that I know something about heat. It was hot, every bit as hot as anything I've experienced in the southern US, but we've already established that. The story here has to do with the girl I was dating at the time. Before she'd blossomed with a more than impressive bust size, she'd held ambitions of being a professional dancer (like, real ambitions, winning at regional level competition
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Welcome to Richmond, Virginia!
We have an average of 41 days over 90F/32C a year, and our record highs exceed 90F/32C from March to October. Humidity is always high - it's not unusual to have temps and humidity both in the mid- to high 90's.
Uncomfortable!!!
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Re: Your sig. The opposite is true too. I know from personal experience how stupid you can sound mispronouncing the Hell out a word whose exact definition you're quite clear on.
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Re:The best part? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yesterday's high was 22C. Predicted high for today is only 16C.
I'm happy with a summer that means I can sit around outside without feeling uncomfortable, do some moderate exercise (eg play a sport) outside and not die, and have a home I can cool to a comfortable temperature for 95%+ of the time just by opening the windows.
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Yes they do!
Last year it fell on a thursday!
You just run the house heating at 40 celcius (Score:2)
Problem solved.
Or maybe they could do what they do just now; pump it directly into the atmosphere.
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People still want hot water...
Besides, this is British summer we're talking about here so what does 1 week matter compared to the 51 cold and wet weeks in a year? ;-)
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Re:The best part? (Score:4, Funny)
They have summer in London now?
Re:The best part? (Score:5, Informative)
I think there may have been 3 or more days of sun in August 2005.
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They have summer in London now?
No, but ask me again on June 21st.
Re:The best part? (Score:5, Interesting)
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I guess the homes that would be heated will already have some sort of heating, maybe they will use that to compliment getting less data center heat.
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It'll work all year round! You'll never feel cold in July ever again, and you may not even need to use your oven to make a roast.
Well, this is from the country that invented the "AGA", which is some kind of hybrid kitchen range/oven/furnace that burns fuel 24x7x365, and which has no temperature adjustment. I guess their theory is that they live in a chilly climate.
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Well, it was actuelly a Swede who invented the AGA. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGA_cooker
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No they don't all burn fuel 24x7, the electric ones can use off-peak electricity (which is generally considerably cheaper) and so store the heat for use during the day (and only draw extra if they need to).
The heat given off by the AGA also saves the kitchen from needing separate heating (and more so depending on the size of the house).
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Well, this is from the country that invented the "AGA" ...
The AGA was invented by a Swede, Dr. Gustaf Dalén. AGA is an abbreviation of Aktiebolaget Gasaccumulator.
Source. [wikipedia.org]
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I highly doubt they will be transporting the heat directly.
The article says "district heat [wikipedia.org]". That means they are transporting the heat directly as a utility. It's a somewhat common setup in much of Europe.
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Would it ever happen in the US? District heat is surely tantamount to communism?
It's interesting to note that district heat was a quite common at one time in the UK - especially on large local authority housing developments. It fell out of favour in a big way in the 70s and 80s because it wasn't controllable and was seemed to be expensive.
In many cases, the schemes were ripped out and replaced with individual gas boilers in each apartment.
Seems we're coming full circle.
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Read as; the Gas Boiler companies/Gas Companies realised they could sell far more if every home in a town didn't have a supply of hot water running into it.
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From the article:
Seattle Steam (Score:4, Informative)
Pretty much every building big and small in Belltown, Downtown, First Hill and parts of Capitol Hill are heated by one of these "communist" steam companies [seattlesteam.com].
Sadly, most of the 1930's brick apartments used to have steam heat. Most were not part of Seattle Steam, but used their own private boiler. Like with you, these were ripped out in the 70's and 80's and replaced with (now very expensive) electric heaters or if you were lucky some big fan with a gas flame at the bottom. Why? Probably so they could lower your rent not having to include heat (or more likely, just keep rent the same and pocket the difference). Course, the heat they provided would have been cheaper overall... electric heat is extremely expensive.
I was lucky enough to live an building that still had "free heat" and it was great. My electric bill was only $15 a month. Plus the radiators would leak steam just enough to humidify the apartment in the winter. Cats love them too because they can sleep on top of ones that have shielding.
Interestingly, the landlady of that apartment said the building used to have gas stoves as well but those were also replaced in the 70's and 80's with electric ranges. Why? So they didn't have to take on the gas bill either. Keep in mind they didn't have individual meters for gas in the 1930's and it be almost impossible to "re-wire" all the gas-lines to meter them.
Typically the only communal things left in apartments are sewer, water and garbage.
PS: For some reason they liked to paint over the mahogany trim in the 80's as well. That and they had a penchant for carpeting over hardwood floors. I swear, nothing good came out of the 80's whatsoever... not a god damn thing.
PPS: Almost all of the old 1930's apartments still have their original iceboxes [wikipedia.org].
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watt is joules per second. It's a unit of energy. Heat is energy.
The heat will be "low grade" (Score:5, Interesting)
so I gather they are converting the excess heat to electricity
No. AC heat is "low grade". That is it's a few degrees above ambient so it'd be wildly inefficient to try to generate electricity from it. Heat can be measured in Watts just as electricity can.
e.g.
A typical 1gW nuclear power station will produce about 2gW of heat for each 1gW of electricity (35% efficiency or so). This is "waste" heat, though of course, it could be used to power adsorption chillers or used for industrial processes or domestic space and water heating, usually it's pumped directly into an ocean or river. Our power infrastructure is highly inefficient, about 60% at the best power stations. Of the approx 40% of total energy which does get turned into electricity, most of this is used for stuff like Air Conditioning, which is simply heat management. Refrigeration, which is heat management. Space heating, which is heat management.
We spend a lot of our time and money simply moving heat around (which is what they're doing in the article) [wikipedia.org]. This would be less of a problem if we were better at insulating things, there's actually no reason that the nearby houses should even need this heat, it's simply poor design [wikipedia.org].
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We spend a lot of our time and money simply moving heat around (which is what they're doing in the article). This would be less of a problem if we were better at insulating things, there's actually no reason that the nearby houses should even need this heat, it's simply poor design.
True, we've had the tech and abilities to build homes with out electricity for oh two thousand years. It takes properly designing your house to make use of all resources though. Something that I didn't know, was that even ancient
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I am dubious as whether even in an electricity -> heat -> electricity situation they can say they are creating X megawatts. Wouldn't it have made more sense for them to say "save X megawatts"?
Brrr (Score:5, Funny)
Cold here. Going to turn up the thermostat with some chess online.
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Great idea (Score:5, Interesting)
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Back when a single mainframe + disk farm really did take up an entire large data center, the company I work for (up north of N.Y.C.) vented in outside winter air to save on cooling costs.
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Anecdote (Score:4, Funny)
Sometime ago, I had a conversation with someone who was complaining how inefficient his computer was; that 90% of the energy was turned into heat. My reply: "But doesn't that make it a very efficient heater?"
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Damn. (Score:4, Funny)
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Warm Wishes,
palegray.net
Re:Damn. (Score:4, Funny)
P4 (Score:2)
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All the cyrix chips i've ever seen were socket 7 devices with heatsinks/fans to match
IIRC the P4 was the chip that introduced the concept of heatsink mountings that were seperate from the socket to support it's HUGE heatsink requirements.
What happens if the Data Center shuts down? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What happens if the Data Center shuts down? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What happens if the Data Center shuts down? (Score:5, Interesting)
I hope you don't wind up with a cyst developing in your testicle like I did... and that was only 2 hrs a day on the train using a laptop for 3 months. Admittedly this laptop was a piece of shit that should never have been released with the name laptop, and it got so hot i often would have to shut the bastard down half way through the train ride home as it was going to burn my legs. HTH, HAND.
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LOL what the fuck did you expect? Cooking your balls every day, they hang outside for a reason.
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No global warming fears here... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure the laptop i'm using right now could do a better job. Plus, I don't have to worry about my children's future.
call me an idealist, but (Score:5, Interesting)
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Huge bandwidth, massive latency.
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So... (Score:5, Funny)
A cautionary thermal tale (Score:4, Interesting)
Ages ago (60s or early 70s), a large aluminum company built a new HQ building (in Richmond, IIRC). They ran the numbers on computer-cooling vs building-heating, and made the computers an integral part of the equation (downscaling the heating plant accordingly). You see where this is going...
As the move approached, the DP guys saw an opportunity, and canceled their PO to Armonk... opting instead for an Amdahl, I believe. Winter came, and people started wearing coats at their desks. My friend who worked there reported that they were hastily building a kluge auxiliary heating plant with insulated ducts running across a parking lot.
Of course, the Docklands project doesn't sound like it's making any assumptions about the amount of waste heat, just doing something useful with it. But I hadn't thought of that paleo-computing tale in decades and had to pass it along.
Re:A cautionary thermal tale (Score:4, Insightful)
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That would be interesting, if you had bothered to say what DP, Armonk, or Amdahl is.
This site is for nerds. Nerds know these things, and don't have to be told. Armonk is where IBM used to build mainframes. Amdahl was a guy who designed mainframes for IBM, and who later went on to found a company of the same name which made mainframes which were compatible with IBM's mainframes.
IBM is a computer company.
Mainframes are a class of large computer, now rare.
Computers are programmable machines for processing data.
DP is an acronym for 'Data Processing'
Is there anything else you'd like to know?
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What is the ultimate question to life, the universe, and everything?
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What is the ultimate question to life, the universe, and everything?
42.
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What is the ultimate question to life, the universe, and everything?
42.
Oh, the question? How many roads must a man walk down.
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That's the answer, he asked for the question.
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Did you just make that up or is it based on some motion picture?
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Is there anything else you'd like to know?
You forgot to elaborate on that "data" thing. Wassat?
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DP is an acronym for 'Data Processing'
... Double Penetration?
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No it isn't, it is just the initials. An acronym is a word made up of initials, like NASA. And you didn't say what OP meant.
BTW, there is a difference between Nerd and Wanker. You appear to fall into the latter category.
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My university had a similar problem. When the computing building was refurbished, air conditioning was installed in all the labs, but heating wasn't. It was assumed the computers would keep the rooms warm enough. That was fine, until a few years ago when computers started to do things like go on standby automatically, reduce their clock speed when unused etc. Changing all the CRT screens to LCDs had a big impact too. The rooms are now cold in winter. (And presumably, the aircon bill a lot lower.)
But... (Score:2, Insightful)
Intel, you're my hot water heater! (Score:2)
The next PC I make I am going to put in the basement and have a peltier heat exchanger to use the waste heat from the peltier and the PC to pre-heat the water for my hot water heater.
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But you might have problems getting all those hyperthreaded cores utilised. In its place I recommend the old Athlon X2 6000+, with a TDP of 125 watts; easy to peg both cores and get a space-heater. I used to have one, my room never got cold back then.
Heat!=power (Score:4, Informative)
As with anything written by a reporter, engineering details are all f'ed up.
"The project is expected to produce up to nine megawatts of power for the local community."
No, the project will probably pipe 9MW of heat from the server farm over to the housing complex. Hopefully they can use 9MW of heat continuously, summer and winter.
âoeThe energy savings will equate to boiling 3,000 kettles continuously,â
Um - that's a really funny way of thinking about saving energy. 9Mw/3000= 3kw/kettle. That's a hell of a kettle.
For anyone who thinks that running a computer in their house to heat it is clever, you would do a lot better (price AND CO2 wise) just running a furnace or your heat pump. Resistance heating is the WORST way to heat a house.
If you're going to be producing the heat anyway and can find a use for it like this, please do! Don't think that because you CAN use a computer for a heater means that it makes sense.
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>Hopefully they can use 9MW of heat continuously, summer and winter.
You can actually use wasted heat to produce chilled water.
It's quite common in co-generation.
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If this is heat rejected from a server farm, it'll be too low grade to do much with it other than heating. You might be able to heat the premise hot water a tiny bit...
Absorption chillers, the common way to do waste heat to cooling, want medium grade waste heat a lot hotter than what's coming from a server farm and steam generation is totally out of the question.
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I never said it'd be efficient; thermodynamically, or perhaps even "economically.*"
But what else are they going to with 9MW of warm wind in the summer?
I suppose they could drying something (laundry, fruit, paper)
* For some variant of the modern corruption of oikonomos
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True. But the only alternative to computer heat in my apartment is in-wall heater.
Which means both are resistance heaters but one crunches numbers.
A hell of a kettle (Score:4, Interesting)
Modern kettles do consume 3kW [edoxa.co.uk], they have these huge, flat elements that boil very fast.
It's actually more efficient, as less heat will be lost from the body of the kettle during the boil cycle, because it has less time.
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Also, 2.5-3.2kW is about what the largest element of most electric ranges consume at full power. Sounds reasonable to me.
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At least our electricity comes in the form of 60Hz like god intended. Our sockets [powercords.co.uk] look cooler too... not all freaky like yours :-)
Serious question though... If you take a camera made for NTSC and use it in Europe, do all the lights flicker because of the frequency? I swear I've seen flickering lights behind news reporters doing live shots. Does video equipment have to compensate for the flicker of AC power?
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"No, the project will probably pipe 9MW of heat from the server farm over to the housing complex."
No you're wrong. Heat is the energy transfered (measured in Joules). The 9MW is the heat transfer *rate* and it is indeed a power quantity.
Ask Wikipedia if you don't believe me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat#Notation [wikipedia.org]
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âoeThe energy savings will equate to boiling 3,000 kettles continuously,â
Um - that's a really funny way of thinking about saving energy. 9Mw/3000= 3kw/kettle. That's a hell of a kettle.
3Kw is the default for electric kettles in the UK. We drink a lot of tea, you know.
Efficiency of a heat engine (Score:4, Informative)
I suppose that they did investigate the matter, but I wonder how this works. It's clear that there are a lot of watts being dissipated in the datacenter, but the problem is that they are dissipated against room temperature air. In order to heat houses with that, you have to use a heat pump which converts a heat flow at room temperature into a 65 C water that can easily be transported over large distances.
Normally, an airconditioning works as a heat pump that absorbs the heat by evaporating refrigerant slightly below room temperature (say 10 C), then compressing it so that it can condense and release the heat in an outdoor radiator at 40 C (ambient temperature up to 35 C). An ideal heat engine would be able to do this with an efficiency of 313 K/(40 C-10 C) = 10, which means that in order to displace 10 W of heat, you need to put in 1 W of mechanical work. I believe that a practical air-conditioning heat pump has an efficiency of 4 or so. Now in order to release the heat against 65 C (condensor temperature 75 C) instead of 35 C, the efficiency would halve. The work that you have to put into this heat engine comes from a power plant which itself has only 35% efficiency. So the balance would be:
Standard datacenter:
Server heat production: P
A/C electricity consumption: 0.25*P
Heat from burning fuel in power plant: 3.75*P
Datacenter with residential heating:
Server heat production: P
Heat pump electricity consumption: 0.6*P
Heat output to homes: 1.6*P
(gain: 1.6*P) Heat in power plant: 4.8*P (extra cost: 1.05*P)
Net gain: 0.55*P. For that you have to do all the infrastructure of big insulated hot-water pipes to residential areas and special heat pumps. It's not clear to me that this will pay off (in money and in environmental cost).
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I think that the GP was referring to COP:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficient_of_performance [wikipedia.org]
Scaling up to combined heat and power (Score:5, Informative)
KWK (Score:3, Informative)
this is called 'Kraft-Wärme-Kopplung' in German and warmte-kracht-koppeling in dutch. see also Combined Heat and Power or CHP.
how? (Score:2)
I wonder how they do it technically (yea, i was too busy to actually RTFA), but other than that i wonder why no one has attempted this any sooner!
And i think the scales on the summary are "a little" bit off
Another source of heat ... (Score:2)
Broken (Score:2)
French to the rescue... (Score:3, Interesting)
Its a start (Score:2)
If I were a writer I would try to write a SCi-Fi novel about this type of thinking taken to the Nth degree. Alas I am not a writer so the world is spared.
But I think this type of thinking is great. I wish my house recaptured dryer heat (and humidity) in the winter. And that I could pump refrigerator heat directly outside during the summer.
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Then can you use the electricity to power the computers?
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That's not as crazy as it sounds. As long as the cost of operating the steam turbines and generators (and the amortized cost of the installation) is less than the amount you'll save utility power, it's feasible.
My guess is utility power is going to be cheaper, though. The Rankine steam cycle isn't terribly efficient -- you'll be luck to get more than a few percent back from your waste heat.
Oblig Simpson's quote (Score:2)
We obey the laws of thermodynamics in this house, young lady!