Tiny data centre used to heat public swimming pool

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

50•breitling•1h ago

Comments

9dev•1h ago

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?

breitling•1h ago

I saw on TV a long time ago that a funeral home's "energy" (burning bodies) was used to heat homes somewhere in Europe.

We can just use data centers for heating too...maybe turn around all these protests against them

josefritzishere•1h ago

If wishes were fishes.

9dev•1h ago

There's lots of district heating in Germany for example, but it's usually fed from either big heat pumps, bio mass plants, or heat from waste incineration plants. There's no reason to not use excess heat from data centres too - I'm pretty sure I read that already being done in several places.

But in some cases, a data centre might be too remotely located, or the infrastructure is too lacking to make it economically feasible, which still leaves me wondering why you couldn't try to recuperate at least some of it as electricity on-site...

Symbiote•56m ago

> I'm pretty sure I read that already being done in several places.

Presumably you read this very recently, since it's mentioned at the end of the article.

SilasX•54m ago

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri: "It is every citizen's final duty to go into the tanks, and become one with all the people."

gruez•48m ago

Doesn't "tanks" imply some sort of composting operation, rather than burning bodies?

wffurr•1h ago

It's not anywhere near hot enough to generate steam and make electricity.

There are uses for low grade heat but they require colocation and careful design, which costs more than just dumping the heat.

cyberax•16m ago

It actually is, just not water steam. There's a hot springs resort in Alaska that uses pentane (boiling point 38C) to generate energy. The efficiency is terrible, of course.

newpavlov•1h ago

Because it's not economical, the required hardware is unlikely to pay for itself during its lifetime. The gradient is too small (~50C), which means low Carnot efficiency. Additionally, extraction of low-enthalpy energy involves obstruction of heat transfer, meaning lower cooling efficiency. It may have been a different story if we had computer hardware able to efficiently operate at 200-300C.

Even steel plants which deal with significantly higher waste heat gradients rarely bother with recovering energy.

IshKebab•37m ago

The degree to which you can extract energy from heat depends on the temperature difference compared to ambient. Efficient power stations all need super heated steam (like 600C). This would be like 100C max which is not very useful for generating electricity. It's fine for heating houses and swimming pools though.

muvlon•23m ago

The concept of waste-heat-to-power (WHP) exists, but its efficiency is limited by thermodynamics. Basically, heat energy is not equal to usable energy. All energy ultimately wants to be heat energy, and it is much easier and more efficient to go from electrical or mechanical energy to heat than vice-versa. Therefore, when you do have an application that actually wants heat, not electricity, such as a public swimming pool or district heating, it is way more efficient to use your waste heat as heat. Even in cases where the desired temperature is wildly different from that of your waste heat, you can convert one heat level into another very efficiently using heat pumps.

alnwlsn•20m ago

Look up Carnot efficiency. The maximum amount of work you can theoretically extract depends only on a temperature difference. For a datacenter running chips at 100C into ambient air at 60F, it's about 25%. So even with perfect capture, you are guaranteed to lose 3/4 of your input energy to the datacenter as heat anyway.

For comparison, an IC engine has a Carnot efficiency of something like 80% on paper, but the reality you get is only 20-30%

snarf21•13m ago

Undecided just did an episode on a waste heat machine that is being slowly rolled out to industry. The founder of the company is also the guy who invented the Super Soaker.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuQRxatte5g

fjni•1h ago

Bathhouse in New York wrote about this. Not sure they still do it to this day.

https://help.abathhouse.com/hc/en-us/articles/16748674443924...

stavros•1h ago

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?

driverdan•53m ago

GPU power density is very high. The B300, for example, is rated at 1400W TDP. You can fit a lot of B300s in the space of a washing machine.

gravel7623•53m ago

And more importantly, once the pool is warm enough (or in a very hot day), doesn't it lose its cooling efficiency?

chippiewill•50m ago

Pre-GPU times you'd be right, but these days a 4U server could have 8 GPUs pulling 350+ watts each. A washing machine sized unit could contain perhaps 4 of these 4U servers so the unit as a whole could be drawing upwards of 11kW.

chucksta•49m ago

No expert but I would think an indoor pool in a temperature controlled environment would control for a lot of heat loss from the water.

sushibowl•48m ago

This washing machine sized box draws 50kW of power. It wouldn't be able to heat up a cold swimming pool very much, but it would be enough to keep a pool that's already hot at a stable temperature.

cm2012•1h ago

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.

bojangleslover•54m ago

This is an unironically good idea

cyanydeez•52m ago

unfortunately, it's like saying all billionaires should let people swim in their pools when they're away.

amelius•45m ago

also not a bad idea

gruez•45m ago

Surely it's just cheaper to build further away from residential areas? For this to work you'd need to be close to residential areas, but that's where you get the most NIMBY opposition. And if the datacenter is in the middle of some industrial park, who would want to drive 30 minutes to an industrial park to have a swim?

vidarh•40m ago

The last place I lived, the nearest data centre was a few hundred meters from the local swimming pool, in a business park. Most people would never have known the data centre was there.

Elsewhere, e.g. in London, Docklands is both full of high density data centres and high-end residential buildings and offices that could certain use the waste heat in winter at least.

Most of the data centres there just looks like office buildings on the outside, and most residents won't know they are there.

theodric•1h ago

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.

Many such cases!

matheusmoreira•56m ago

Is it feasible to do this at smaller scales? Would be cool to use my compurers to heat water at home. Put all that useless heat to good use.

Air conditioners could do it too, right? Pump heat into a water reservoir instead of just throwing it away?

newpavlov•54m ago

Some people use cryptocurrency miners to heat their homes. It's certainly better than dumb resistive heating, but depending on various conditions it can cost more than installing a heat pump.

matheusmoreira•48m ago

A dedicated heat pump would be cheaper if we consider heating to be the device's primary purpose. The idea is the computers are doing all sorts of useful things, and the heat is just a free byproduct of that activity.

RulerOf•42m ago

I have a pool heater and an air conditioner, and I'm running both at the same time. They're fifty feet apart, but this thought crosses my mind constantly.

alexpotato•31m ago

This does exist btw.

It's a stainless steel coil that you can put on your A/C and then run water from your pool over it to heat the pool.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7fB8ul9dZw

thomas-skowron

teeray•51m ago

> Start-up Deep Green charges clients to use its computing power for artificial intelligence and machine learning.

What about running the compute workloads of the municipality instead?

avianlyric•42m ago

I doubt the municipality needs 28kW of GPU compute, and certainly not at the prices someone like Deep Green is going to be charging.

sschueller•50m ago

Providing remote heat is a common thing in Switzerland[1]. Just like Waste valorisation plants[2] that additionally produce electricity.

[1] https://www.computerwoche.de/article/2690747/rechenzentrum-h...

[2] https://stefan.schueller.net/posts/kva-winterthur/

dn3500•47m ago

What a useless article! I found some actual information here:

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.

alexpotato•37m ago

I don't know about in swimming centers in England but I do know YMCAs in the US often have budgets that look like:

- Revenue: $25.01M

- Expenses: $25M

So "small savings" like this can add up for them.

appplication•15m ago

This is mostly just due to how nonprofits work. If you have excess revenue, you can’t return it to shareholders so you might as well spend it on mission-oriented activities.

hahn-kev•37m ago

> The heat generated by a washing-machine-sized data centre is being used to heat a Devon public swimming pool.

You mean server.

Schlagbohrer•33m ago

> "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.

designerarvid•25m ago

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.

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