Comment on Home heating from datacentres - good use of waste energy or a waste of money? | TechRadar
ilickfrogs@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Realistically I can’t picture an economically feasible way to transport it. But in theory, sure.
Heat pumps can be used to move heat around in a building. If the data center is directly adjacent to housing, this would be trivial to implement efficiently. The same system cooling the data center would be heating homes.
In the summer though, you’d have to push that heat to atmosphere, so this only helps in colder climates
Proximity is a huge issue. I’ve worked at a dozen or so datacenters over the years, and none are all that close to residential areas…l
I’ve been inside of data centers that are in an otherwise normal office building. Hospitals and stuff too. This could be a useful technology.
Yep, we’re working close to guys from Energy Machines company, they do solutions exacrly like that - use heat from one part of the building in another one, no matter, data center or something else.
There's a thing called industrial symbiosis, where the waste products from one business become the inputs for another business. It takes a bit of effort and planning, but it can result in a much more sustainable world. There's a place in Denmark called Kalundborg that's really been working on it and has some nice examples.
I think the problem is that the temperature of the heat source is too low. It’s quite hard to recuperate energy from low temperature waste heat economically. With waste heat from high temperature sources, you can use steam, which can ‘store’ a lot of energy because of the latent enthalpy difference, which results in low mass flow rates. With water, you would need higher mass flow rates, so bigger tubes, pumps …
Water or steam.
If your server room generates steam you may have a bit of overheating issue.
Hot water is possible, but you’d need crazy insulated pipes and/or close buildings to heat before the water cools down too much.
With this scale you probably can’t get that much or go too far. You’re probably looking at partially heating a nearby office building or large apartment. I’d like to know for sure.
You could use the warm water to cool down some other factory that could turn it to steam.
In winter, you can preheat drinking water from 4 °C to 10 °C for many households, which will decrease their heating bills. This is how low-temperature geothermal sources are utilized in my country.
As for summer, there are facilities/industries that need warm or hot water, such as swimming pools.
You use water as a thermal agent. All you need to transport it is some insulated pipes.
someguy3@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
This kind of district heating is not terribly uncommon. The question here is how hot can you get the water and if you have to ‘top it off’.