This Data Center’s Excess Heat Will Help Warm Thousands Of Homes

Source: ZDNet, Stig Øyvann for Norse Code
Photo: Åke Eson Lindman/Digiplex

A Stockholm data center’s heat exchangers are being linked up to the city’s heating network.

Nordic data-center operator Digiplex and Stockholm Exergi, the Swedish capital’s leading energy supplier, are going to be using excess heat from servers to warm the equivalent of 10,000 households.

The two companies say their large-scale heat reuse agreement is the world’s first where an operational data center with indirect evaporative air-to-air heat exchangers is being retrofitted to transfer excess heat to a city’s district heating grid.

Digiplex says that a progressive data center needs to explore every avenue to reduce its carbon footprint, with the world’s data centers responsible for two percent of the world’s annual CO2 emissions, and three percent of the world’s power consumption.

“Every time we browse the internet, stream a TV series or use the cloud, a process starts in a data center,” said Digiplex CEO Gisle Eckhoff in a statement.

“If that data center is a power-hungry fossil fuel-fired one that releases excess heat into the atmosphere, we as individuals are contributing to climate change.”

https://www.zdnet.com/article/this-data-centers-excess-heat-will-help-warm-thousands-of-homes