Something I have been wondering: Why don't data centres use the excess heat for a sort of energy recuperation, turning at least some of it back into electricity?
I don't understand how a server (the "washing-machine-sized datacenter") can heat up any fraction of a swimming pool appreciably. Wouldn't it be a few kW tops?
All data centers that are in controversial areas should offer free heated swimming pools for the neighborhood. You could add a giant pool complex as a percentage or two of the cost of a big data center.
Equinix AM3 provides heat to the Amsterdam Science Park.
Undisclosed large Swiss private corporate datacenter provides heat to residential complexes in the surrounding area, as well as being integrated with the grid operator and required to spin up generators and island itself on demand, as part of the license to operate.
> "Sean Day, who runs the leisure centre, said he had been expecting its energy bills to rise by £100,000 this year.
"The partnership has really helped us reduce the costs of what has been astronomical over the last 12 months - our energy prices and gas prices have gone through the roof," he said.
...
Last summer, BBC News revealed 65 swimming pools had closed since 2019, with rising energy costs cited as a significant reason."
That's terrible that pools are closing. No one even builds new public swimming pools anymore, so it's awful to close the few that exist.
In my home town the local steel plant has been connected to the district heating systems for half a century. This is extremely mature technology and widely used in parts of the world where heating homes is more important than cooling them.
> The data center delivers up to 1.7 MW of reusable heat – enough enough to warm 6,000 energy-efficient homes in winter or provide 20,000 five-minute showers every day in summer.
District heating is a mature technology. Direct Use geothermal heat is the one I am personally most familiar with -- as a geophysicist. However "waste" heat utilization is a definite thing for people with mechanical engineering/heat and mass transfer training.
(Edited to add: there are several examples of public swimming pools being heated with Low T geothermal heat in the Perth metropolitan region of Western Australia.)
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Undisclosed large Swiss private corporate datacenter provides heat to residential complexes in the surrounding area, as well as being integrated with the grid operator and required to spin up generators and island itself on demand, as part of the license to operate.
Many such cases!
Air conditioners could do it too, right? Pump heat into a water reservoir instead of just throwing it away?
What about running the compute workloads of the municipality instead?
[1] https://www.computerwoche.de/article/2690747/rechenzentrum-h...
[2] https://stefan.schueller.net/posts/kva-winterthur/
https://www.techspot.com/news/97995-data-center-uses-waste-h...
The "data center" produces about 28 kW of heat and the swimming pool has cut its gas bill by 62%. They are saving US$24,000 per year.
You mean server.
"The partnership has really helped us reduce the costs of what has been astronomical over the last 12 months - our energy prices and gas prices have gone through the roof," he said.
...
Last summer, BBC News revealed 65 swimming pools had closed since 2019, with rising energy costs cited as a significant reason."
That's terrible that pools are closing. No one even builds new public swimming pools anymore, so it's awful to close the few that exist.
https://d4project.org/
> The data center delivers up to 1.7 MW of reusable heat – enough enough to warm 6,000 energy-efficient homes in winter or provide 20,000 five-minute showers every day in summer.
https://blog.siemens.com/2026/05/sustainable-data-infomaniak...
https://news.infomaniak.com/en/infomaniak-inaugurates-a-revo...
Paris 2024: Excess Data Center Heat Used to Warm Olympic Swimming Pools
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/sustainability/paris-202...
(Edited to add: there are several examples of public swimming pools being heated with Low T geothermal heat in the Perth metropolitan region of Western Australia.)