Germany Wants To Reuse Data Centers' Heat. No One Is Buying It (bloomberg.com) 47
Germany wants to force its power-hungry data centers to harness excess heat for warming residential homes -- an effort which the industry warns is likely to fall flat. From a report: The country has become one of the largest global hubs for data centers thanks to its clear data protection and security laws. Politicians are now trying to re-purpose some of their controversial excess heat to improve efficiency in light of the energy crisis. While in theory an innovative way to reduce the industry's immense carbon footprint, experts have pointed to a flaw in the government's proposal expected to be passed this month: potential recipients of waste heat are not being compelled to take it.
The warm air expelled by server farms isn't nearly as hot as that required by most district heating networks. That means any utility they partner with must invest in heat pumps to bring the air to usable levels, further ramping up costs and power usage. What's at stake for Europe's largest economy is that it either risks scaring off IT investments and slowing its efforts to digitize, or falling behind on climate goals. The energy efficiency law being prepared by the government aims to save some 500 terawatt-hours of energy by 2030 -- pegged in part on a requirement to reuse at least 30% of a new data center's heat by 2025.
The warm air expelled by server farms isn't nearly as hot as that required by most district heating networks. That means any utility they partner with must invest in heat pumps to bring the air to usable levels, further ramping up costs and power usage. What's at stake for Europe's largest economy is that it either risks scaring off IT investments and slowing its efforts to digitize, or falling behind on climate goals. The energy efficiency law being prepared by the government aims to save some 500 terawatt-hours of energy by 2030 -- pegged in part on a requirement to reuse at least 30% of a new data center's heat by 2025.
It's incredibly low grade heat. (Score:4, Informative)
About the best they could do is sell it to people in the same building or sell it back to the building to offset winter heating costs. Are there no decent engineers anymore in Germany? They might as well be trying to resell used lint,
Re: It's incredibly low grade heat. (Score:2)
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Didn't the Pirate Bay founder live in a room that he heated with his servers? You just know somewhere there's some people huddled around an Antminer Beowolf cluster trying to stay warm
Re:It's incredibly low grade heat. (Score:4, Interesting)
One time in my home, the exhaust pipe from my Electric Dryer fell off... It actually did a decent job heating my house. However the air was so humid, that after the dryer stopped, it became very cold as everything was so damp. However if I were to try to pipe the heat to my homes heatpump, the air will be cold by the time it got there, and I would need more energy to blow the hot air to the heat pump, thus offsetting the net gain.
If you built your offices in a cold climate, and have them placed above your data center, then you might be able to save in heating, however that loss will used when trying to cool the area. And I am sure many of you who have worked in offices before, know how temperamental a large buildings HVAC system is, having a more complex system could lead to a lot more issues. Especially if the data center gets too hot...
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This is probably the best idea, but the easiest way would be to bring the data to the glass houses, without the center. Hyperscalers don't really need centralised datacenters with full time support for most of their processing, if a redundant module fails they can get around to it at their leisure. So modularize at shipping container level and put a couple next to the existing glass house farms.
https://www.greentech.technolo... [www.greentech.technology]
Re: It's incredibly low grade heat. (Score:2)
Re: It's incredibly low grade heat. (Score:2)
The most efficient would be to use district cooling networks.
Youd need expensive heat pumps to dump the waste heat into a district heating network.
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Please tell me how a Data Center sells excess heat to people in the same... building?
Who lives in a Data Center? No, those crazy admins don't count.
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Overbuild and rent office space.
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Just for comparison, how much does new lint sell for?
A better Solution to North Americans (Score:2)
Re: A better Solution to North Americans (Score:1)
Even if you do that, information theory is nowhere near optimum density, whereas a heating coil is. You can perhaps fit 1800W of compute power in 1U (that is 19x30x1.5 inch), you can easily fit about 20kW of heating coil in the same space. Do you have room for a rack in your basement, including measures for the noise generation? What do you do in the other 3 seasons with the equipment, now you need to cool it.
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information theory is nowhere near optimum density
What does that even mean? Something something colorless green ideas sleeping furiously...
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colorless green ideas sleeping furiously...
Sounds like something Pink Floyd would sing about. I am impressed!
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This thought occurred to me as well; my one tower server keeps my bedroom about 15F warmer than the rest of my apartment, which is lovely in the winter.
The devil, as it always is, is in the details...
First, this gets a bit rough to control, depending on the house. If they've already got central HVAC with air vents, great. If it's baseboard heat, then air ducts need to be run. Assuming that's done, there still needs to be a thermostat intelligent enough to know when to turn on the furnace; room heating could
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You forgot the larger-than-life security risk, provided by easy physical access to the device itself.
"I'll give you €500 for one night in the basement, no questions asked".
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The AC problem is easily solved by hauling icebergs from Antarctica and putting the melt water into a new pipeline that runs from South Africa to Germany.
Re: A better Solution to North Americans (Score:2)
They need to use district cooling networks.
They are much more efficient to begin with, and having all the low level return heat at a single large building the heat much more economical to reuse.
For one thing, with district cooling they are only needing to change the temperature of water a much smaller amount, and even household heat pumps can handle turning 100 degree water into 40 degree water.
Using the heat rejected in a district cooling network is much more economical because the network is designed for
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force datacenters to rent space in peoples utility rooms in their houses. Free heat and rollout of fiber country wide!
Amazon is forcing a data center into my home town and all I get out of it is a huge power transmission line through my front yard. But several members of the town planning commission are getting jobs with Amazon corporate. Nice.
Existing datcentres... (Score:2)
That have been designed to extract and dump waste heat, not concentrate and utilise it ... ...they are starting from the precisely wrong design ... so it will be very expensive to use this heat
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Most Data centers have started out small, perhaps a small rack system in a closet, then as the business grows, they need to take steps to upgrade their infrastructure. Being that most small businesses fail within the first year, trying to get a good design from day 1 will waste money that they don't have, and will probably be better served with paying for employees.
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No, not these data centers. Nobody builds a data center today smaller than 10,000m2, and most are at least an order of magnitude larger.
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Definitely not the AWS, Azure, GCN and Oracle datacenters that you find in the Frankfurt area.
heat pumps win (Score:2)
Heat pumps works down to close to freezing, to heat a house. They're so efficient because they're using the electricity to harvest existing heat instead of just turning the electricity into heat.
If you already have a temperature gradient, you should be able to use it. Sure there's an initial cost to it, but in the long run it's free energy. Heck, on paper, heat pumps can o
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We converted from a gas furnace to a heat pump (using our existing ducts) last year. Couldn't be happier. I do have to point out that your data is a little out of date though; our heat pump has no problem keeping the house warm even if the outside temp is as low as 5F, with no need for a backup gas furnace. We got down to 18F here in Seattle before Christmas and stayed at a solid 68F.
The other big bonus is the cooling we get in the Summer now, which is something we never had before here in Seattle, and whic
little practical differende from ambient (Score:2)
Hot air from a server transported over many km is not likely going to be better than a heat pump working at a residence on the ambient winter air. This is just thermodynamics and I am surprised German regulators aren't aware of the physics.
Bitcoin mining (Score:2)
At one point people used bitcoin or ethereum miners to heat their homes. In general, the computers are efficient heaters, and if you are wasting 500w of power, better utilize it as heat up your space.
The problem is, those were "throwaway" machines, constantly running at 90C temperatures, churning out one dead GPU after another. Obviously that is not a sustainable business plan.
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Miners baby their GPU's for maximum profit.
Don't believe everything you read on the Internet.
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True story.
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> In general, the computers are efficient heaters
Well, kind of. They're close to traditional resistive heaters (almost 100%) but they're woeful compared to a heat pump system, which can get up to 350% efficiency by taking heat from outside instead of just setting electricity on fire.
Hot air from politicians (Score:2)
They should be reusing the hot air quite a few of their politicians are producing, closest we could get to a perpetuum mobile.
Heat transportation is a major problem (Score:2)
A lot of efficiency is lost when the heat has to be transported over long distances from where it is generated to where it is consumed. I recently saw a presentation from a cloud provider that tackled this problem [www.leaf.cloud]: instead of building big centralized data centers, they build a lot of small ones in places that can use the heat, like basements of hotels.
Greenhouses (Score:2)
I'd think the better solution would be to try to use the heat directly. You might be able to generate a bit of power with a Stirling engine [wikipedia.org] or even make a greenhouse next door that is happy with warm air. I don't expect either to be particularly efficient but at least they'd be good PR.
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Okay, a bit of background:
I used to live in Alaska and looked into crafting a home heating and power solution that would use a stirling engine to provide me with electricity while also heating my home. Commonly called cogeneration. I also worked in a small government datacenter in North Dakota at one point, and had the privilege to have to deal with an air conditioning outage in January. Yes, we opened the doors as a temporary solution.
The problems that immediately come to mind are twofold:
1. Stirling e
Nuclear district heating (Score:2)
Use the waste heat to pre heat the water (Score:1)
District heating is done by heating water and than distributing it to the district.
You can use the waste heat to pre heat the water that than is fed into the heaters that heat the water. Since the water is now a bit warmer, you need less energy to heat it in the district heating. This is not a difficult concept to grasp.
Ban shitcoin processing (Score:2)
Nobody talks about tepid air (Score:2)
" the average Google data center consumes 450,000 gallons of water on a daily basis."
That's what they are after.
Steam Lemonade (Score:1)
Seems like it should work (Score:2)
I can see it next on LTT: Whole-Country Water Cooling