Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrexroad | Hacker News Reader

> This "waste heat" system is a closed loop of efficiency. The 60+ kilowatts of heat energy produced by a storage cluster is not a byproduct to be eliminated but a resource to be harvested.

Are there any other data centers harvesting waste heat for benefit?

View on HN

The EU mandates that all large data centres built/commissioned from July this year will make use of waste heat:

https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2024/germany/rechenzent...

Sounds like part of the reason all the biggest AI data centers are being built outside the EU...

It's more like there are a lot of building restrictions and fines. Overloading the local power systems. Building illegal turbines.

If you can get paid on your waste heat why wouldn't you like that?

"can" and "must" are two different situations.

Yes, plenty - sometimes data centers are built together with apartment or office complexes for this particular purpose. Unfortunately that already pinpoints the core limitation, due to the low-temperature of the data centers. The higher the temperature difference is, the more affective heating becomes - with air cooled systems it requires preparation to ensure that can be used for heating.

Also data centers need physical space, and often - you need heating where there is not a lot of space (cities), and for "district heating" you need higher temperatures usually.

Yandex had a data center in Finland,, not sure if it's still operational. It was heating 1500 homes with 4 MW.

https://www.euroheat.org/dhc/knowledge-hub/datacentre-suppli...

Several swimming pools do to great effect:

https://datacentremagazine.com/data-centres/excess-data-cent...

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64939558

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/free-...

I know that ~ 15 years ago we were already using datacenters in The Netherlands that were used to heat houses in a city.

I do vaguely remember that the economics of it all were not great, but it’s definitely a thing for quite a while already.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com