Data centers produce massive amounts of heat which typically goes into our atmosphere, but a Meta-owned Danish data center in Odense is choosing to do something different. It’s channeling its heat straight into the homes of the local community, helping to keep thousands of homes warm.
Around 40% of a data center’s total energy consumption goes toward cooling its servers, and nearly all of it is released as heat. However, that heat isn’t quite hot enough to warm buildings on its own. Engineering firm Ramboll designed a system to solve this problem by capturing and upgrading the heat so it can be reused.
Water from Odense’s district-heating network is circulated through the data center’s cooling system, where it absorbs heat from the servers. The warmed water then travels to a nearby plant, where ammonia heat pumps raise its temperature to a level suitable for heating buildings—around 70 to 75°C (158°F to 167°F)—before it’s redistributed through the local heating network.
Meta claims the solution has produced roughly 165,000 megawatt-hours of heating, serving around 11,000 households within the system. Meta’s energy specialist Lauren Edelman explains, “Heat pumps are not a new invention, nor are coils for capturing heat. What is new and innovative is the pairing of these two in hyper scale.”
Many people around the world are understandably concerned about the growing number of data centers being built in their communities. And there are good reasons for concern, from the huge amounts of fresh water they can consume to the additional strain they can place on local electricity grids. However, the Odense data center offers an example of how they could also benefit surrounding communities with the right infrastructure and planning.
Source: A data center in Denmark gives away heat that data centers often waste. It runs water from the city's heating network through its cooling units and into heat pumps that raise it enough to fill the radiators of 11,000 homes
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