Home heating from datacentres - good use of waste energy or a waste of money? | TechRadar

Comments

• JakenVeina@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Seems more like such waste heat should be recovered and fed back into the system, to reduce energy consumption for the facility as a whole. If there’s enough waste heat to meaningfully talk about transferring it to homes via water or steam, surely there’s enough to make some electricity.

  I sure don’t want Amazon or Microsoft involved in the utilities businesses, as another commenter pointed out.

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  • UPGRAYEDD@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Heat isnt a great generator of electrical power. At least not at lower temperatures ( below boiling, for steam generation). It also suffers from conversion loss. Anytime you convert energy, there is a loss. Using the heat directly avoids another conversion.

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  • sunbeam60@lemmy.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    The data centres are trying to get rid of the heat!

    Are you proposing converting the heat to electricity? That would require a huge amount of heat pumps (to concentrate the heat) and a turbine hall (the smaller, the less efficient). You’d be talking about 20% efficiency at most, probably more like 10% for the total system efficient.

    Compare that to a good district heating system which is typically 90% efficient.

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• space@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  A lot of people don’t realize that this has been implemented and been used for a long time. In Romania, during communism, most major cities had infrastructure for using heat produced in factories and thermal (usually coal) power plants.

  There are 2 ways in which it was implemented. One was to heat water into steam and to transport the steam using insulated pipes to local facilities that heat water. This can be more efficient, but the disadvantage is that working on pressurized steam pipes is really dangerous for the workers. There have been numerous accidents in the news about those.

  Alternatively, you can simply transport hot water through insulated pipes to local facilities, these can heat the water additionally if the water isn’t hot enough, and then it’s distributed to homes.

  The main issue in Romania is that these systems haven’t been properly maintained in at least 30 years, a lot of heat gets lost and they tend to fail a lot, people get frustrated and disconnect from the network, the neighbors get a worse service because not enough hot water is consumed for the water in the pipes to not go cold and they disconnect too, and the system just gets worse and worse. Some cities have enacted a policy not allowing people to disconnect.

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• HarkMahlberg@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Most of the comments are about the technical or logistical challenge of making this work, but I've got a separate concern. Who would want to pay Amazon for their heating bills? Facebook? Google? They already turned the internet to shit and made fortunes for the privilege, why would I want to pay them for waste heat? What regulations exist to make sure they don't reroute the heat away from my house or apartment while I freeze? What halts them from gouging prices for heat that is a literal byproduct of their actual business? Like I already have enough problems that come from my power and heating company being an effective monopoly on my region. I don't trust data center corps from creating the same, or worse, problems.

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  • someguy3@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    This is very likely not enough heat to run it solely. It will be like a preheater for a district heating company. Or partially heat an office tower, which means they have normal heating system too.

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  • marsokod@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    As heating network, they are and will be regulated like other energy suppliers: gov.uk/…/energy-security-bill-factsheet-heat-netw…

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• ilickfrogs@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Realistically I can’t picture an economically feasible way to transport it. But in theory, sure.

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  • someguy3@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ 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’.

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  • Sneptaur@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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

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    • IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      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

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    • toofpic@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      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.

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  • athos77@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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.

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  • GabberPiet@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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 …

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  • topinambour_rex@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Water or steam.

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    • nevemsenki@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      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.

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  • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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.

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  • space@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    You use water as a thermal agent. All you need to transport it is some insulated pipes.

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• iAvicenna@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  We had a guy in our lab growing pepper plants beside the computers that he kept running for simulations

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• ViscloReader@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Money is a human concept and “expendable” (to some limit of course inflation) Energy is not. If this consume less energy than just venting it out then I think it is a great idea

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  • CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Money is (a very imperfect proxy for) value, be it the value of energy, human labor and time, limited resources, etc. It’s somewhat arbitrary, but not completely.

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• corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I worked in a building designed to be heated by the mainframe in the basement.

  4 years later the mainframe was upgraded to a new mainframe which didn’t put out the heat the old one did.

  It’s been heated by a conventional system ever since, but the gawdawful conduction pipes still mar the exterior. Ugliest boondoggle ever.

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• someguy3@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Unless I missed it, I expected the article to make a case for it being a waste.

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• zwaetschgeraeuber@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  interesting. i work in a dc in my country and here the neighbirs dont want the heat even for free lol

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• shortwavesurfer@monero.town ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  How would you transport it? If its not a lot hotter than the biant it moves slowly. As an example, it been cold here recently at night (45F). My house is currently 67F and the outside temp is 78F. I have the door open which does allow the outdoor temp to warm the house, but its incredibly slow since its only an 11F difference. I have a few computers mining crypto in my bedroom and the heat from those has kept me from really having to use my heater. I have had to use it, but not nearly as much as i would otherwise.

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  • space@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Water and insulated pipes.

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  • niemcycle@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    You’d probably use water as a thermal conduction medium, similar to how old buildings had a boiler in the basement which heated water which was then sent to rooms through radiators.

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    • shortwavesurfer@monero.town ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      But servers couldnt get the water to boiling point. I have lived in several apartments (Minnesota) that used the boiler method you described. Heck, my office was the old pilsbury mansion and used it. I even had to monitor the boiler pressures during maintainence once.

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  • CalicoJack@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    The only way it makes sense is within the same facility. You could use water or refrigerant in heat exchangers, and run insulated lines to other parts of the building. Wouldn’t do too much, but might see a slight reduction in heating costs.

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  • philpo@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Ever heard of heat pumps?

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    • shortwavesurfer@monero.town ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Just watched a heat pump install vid and that looks a bit complicated. Something like window AC units just require you to install it and turn it on. Shouldnt heat pumps be simple like that too?

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