Europe Taps Tech's Power-Hungry Data Centers To Heat Homes

With an energy crisis hitting Europe, governments are exploring ways to recycle electricity used on social-media scrolling, conference calls and video streaming to help heat homes and offices. From a report: Electricity-hungry data centers are seeing huge growth in usage, leading to pressure from European officials to funnel the excess heat generated by their computer chips into municipal heating networks. After years of discussions about putting residual heat to work rather than simply venting it outdoors, more such projects are becoming a reality. In the last year, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft have started connecting, or announced plans to connect, major data centers to district heating systems in Ireland, Denmark and Finland. Alphabet's Google says it is assessing opportunities to recover heat from its data centers across Europe.

Meta Platforms has been recovering excess heat from its data center in Odense, Denmark, since 2020. The Facebook parent is currently expanding that base, with plans to provide enough excess heat to warm about 11,000 homes as of next year. Other data-center operators are providing heat to networks, particularly in Northern Europe, including Equinix, which is expanding its district heating project in Helsinki, and working on new ones in Germany and other countries. In the Netherlands, there are 10 data centers already supplying heat, and another 15 projects being built or researched, according to the Dutch Data Center Association, a trade group. Higher energy prices, stemming from Russia's decision to effectively cut off natural-gas deliveries following its invasion of Ukraine, have boosted the financial incentive for tech companies to invest in systems necessary to sell off their excess heat, energy and tech sector officials say.

Not *that* much heat

[Anonymous Coward]

The datacenter in my office building is used to supplement the building's heat during winter, but it only supplements. There's no way a datacenter would be better than burning some coal, oil, wood, or gas in the individual houses.

Re:Not *that* much heat

[bill_mcgonigle]

> but it only supplements

True. I had the opportunity to work in a new medical center for a while. The city water came in at 45-50*F (winter/summer), cooled the data center with a bunch of giant Lieberts, and then went out to the hot water boilers at 50-55*F. It was downright chilly in there as many of the old mainframes needed 60-65* ambient. This was well before "aisles" were popular or 85*F PC racks.

The hospital water boilers ran on propane so electricity was more expensive per BTU, but the heat had to be dumped somewhere, so it was a bonus to not dump it into the atmosphere. Also, no external radiators to maintain. I imagine the engineering work that was needed to configure the setup paid for itself quite quickly.

Cities that have central steam will probably do better than those with distributed heat production, but hey, smart efficiency can be close to free.

Re:

[ahodgson]

It's not that it's better, it's that the data center is producing the heat anyway and it has to be removed. Co-heat is an excellent way to make use of waste heat.

should have kept it in the home

[suso]

You know if they had just kept the Computing part in the house then they wouldn't need to move it back into the house.

Re:should have kept it in the home

[Dutch Gun]

Old technician yells at cloud. News at 11.

Re:

[lowvisioncomputing]

I keep mine in the home, obviously, so since I heat with (renewable hydro) electricity anyway, might as well get some constructive use out of it.

Maybe I'll fire up MSFS to beat the chill when it's -20 outside ...

Re:

[thegarbz]

Sure. Everyone should have exabytes with of storage at home and in the evenings you can git pull the entire internet for the next day's entertainment. /Mockingsarcasm

Europe's data centers get free cooling?

[Skinkie]

The low calorific energy that comes from cooling would maybe allow a heat exchanger to have some degrees offset, but is not as useful as industry scale residual heat. To me it sounds like the lobby of the past years by the industry: getting free cooling (water).

Re:

[thegarbz]

And you'd be wrong. The idea of waste heat recovery to hear buildings is as old as the mainframe and facilities have been doing it at least locally for a long time.

Re:

[Skinkie]

There you have it: locally. Now transport the water that is at 25 at most 33 degrees over long distances (since data centers are typically not nearby urban housing, not even in Amsterdam) and you would end up with... nothing. But nothing is a perfect way to lose the heat... for free...

Re:

[serafean]

> Now transport the water that is at 25 at most 33 degrees over long distances

Yeah, we can transport heat long distances:
About a third of Prague (CZ) is heated by waste heat from a power plant about 30km from the city itself.
On a distance of 34km, reported temperature drop is of 2C.

In Czech, but I trust you'll manage.
https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

Same in iceland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] transport 10km+ of heated water.

Re:

[Skinkie]

Please read the amount of heat they start with: Czech: 160 degrees. In Iceland: 130 degrees. That is high calorific heat. There is no dispute on that being valuable (and maybe even a bit too much). But the argument that has been made for quite some years now: 25-33 degrees maximum is barely usable for this purpose. Low temperature water heat distribution is in the ballpark of 30-60 degrees already. So in order to get it there a significant electric investment should be added, and there the question rises: w

Re:

[jbengt]

But the argument that has been made for quite some years now: 25-33 degrees maximum is barely usable for this purpose

I'm assuming you're talking degrees C.
If you're using the water to cool refrigerant condensers / chillers, then you can easily get 95F (35C) water and with some engineering 104F (40C) This is a pretty low temperature for heating water, even for some radiant floor systems. Plus, you'll lose a little temperature in the transportation and a little more in the heat exchanger at the consuming e

Re:

[serafean]

If you get a constant 25-33C, tack a water-water heatpump at the end, and distribute the 60C that comes out of it.
Another point I'd argue is that if we can only lose 2C over 34km with 160C as the start temperature, transporting 30C could yield an even smaller heat loss because of the smaller temperature differential. No idea how this would stack up in reality.
I openly admit I don't have even ballpark energy use calculations on this.

I know in some cities they're discussing putting heat pumps in sewage treatm

Re:

[aaarrrgggh]

Often you will do a heat recovery chiller to boost the water temperature.

How do they get waste heat to those 11,000 homes?

[mspohr]

I know nothing about how this works so if anybody knows, please let me know.
It seems like the heat output of a data center would be a lot of not very hot air. How does this get transported to remote offices and houses?
I guess if the data center was designed with water/water heat pumps you could pipe excess hot water to nearby areas but do they even do that?

Re:

[thegarbz]

To your last point yes, IBM has been doing this in their data centres co located to their offices for literal decades. They even pioneered the idea of hot water cooling, i.e. keeping the cooling loop at water temperatures upwards of 65C to improve the efficiency of this process.

Re:

[jbengt]

They even pioneered the idea of hot water cooling, i.e. keeping the cooling loop at water temperatures upwards of 65C to improve the efficiency of this process.

Maybe their mainframes were different, but how can you use 65C water to cool a CPU that's running at 65C or so?

Re:

[elgaard]

The Funen district heating system do use a heat pump:
https://www.datacenterdynamics... [datacenterdynamics.com]

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

You wouldn't want to take a shower in this water in the winter, but you can use it to provide some extra free heat for homes. Rather than heating mains water from 10C or whatever it comes in at, they can heat it from 30C using less energy. Also helps prevent pipes freezing.

Re: How do they get waste heat to those 11,000 hom

[mspohr]

Found this:

Appleâ(TM)s Viborg data center uses air cooling, but instead of venting the heated air into the atmosphere, the plan is to use it to heat water. That hot water would then be fed into the local power station.

The power station already has a district heating system, which pumps hot water to homes in the nearby town of Viborg. Rather than each home having its own heating furnace, they are instead heated by the hot water pumped through all the homes in the town.

Appleâ(TM)s heated water

Not new

[bradley13]

This kind of thing is pretty normal here. We lived near a nuclear power plant. They sent their low temperature steam to a factory, for use in whatever industrial process they had. The residual heat from the factory then went into a heating service for the town.

Re:

[jbengt]

This kind of thing is pretty normal here. We lived near a nuclear power plant. They sent their low temperature steam to a factory, for use in whatever industrial process they had.

Low temperature steam is over 100F. That's not at all the same thing as the temperatures you'd get from water cooled computers.

District heating,

[blugalf]

somehow trying to scramble data center excess heat into the loop. Laudible attempt, might work, and then again it might not.

Re:

[thegarbz]

Not data centres, everything. If you require industrial cooling then there's interest in Europe in recovering the heat.

Re:

[blugalf]

This article is specifically about data centers, not everything. And if it's worth it, great, but I don't take that for granted.

recycle electricity

[groobly]

After it's been used, electricity has a lower voltage, but can still be recycled to power video games makeup tutorials.

Please, let's have people PAY for social media

[what about]

The result would be much LESS HW and ENERGY wasted to shuffle around movies of cats

It will never happen with current sheeple and mainstream media

but hope never dies