Hello everyone and welcome to ZD Tech, ZDNet’s daily editorial podcast. My name is Clarisse Treilles and today I wonder whether we can count on data centers for heating.
But what are we going to heat ourselves with? With the explosion of energy costs, France is betting on a nuclear recovery plan combined with the development of renewable energies. Germany relies on its coal. And many threats hang over the supply of Russian gas.
And among all the options on the table, the data center track remains to be explored. These huge hangars where computer servers are stored suffer from a double energy dilemma. On the one hand, the heat released by the machines is not valued. And on the other hand, an astronomical amount of additional energy is required to cool the installations.
To “green” data centers, tech companies are racking their brains to find a good use for all the waste heat that is expelled from data centers.
Heating entire cities, an ambitious challenge
Initiatives are being taken in France and around the world to use this source of heat. For example, let’s go to northern Europe, where Microsoft has just announced a new project to heat Finnish homes and businesses using its data centers. Microsoft is partnering with a local electricity company that operates an underground heating system.
But the use of the heat given off by computer machines can also be considered on a much smaller scale than that of a city or a district. The French Qarnot Computing has been interested for a decade in the heating of simple dwellings using computer power.
The start-up released models of computer radiators in 2013. Then it completed its offer with digital boilers and warehouse heating systems based on the same principle.
Datacenters facing their “PUE” index
But all this is still only promising. Because the transport of heat over long distances remains a major technical challenge. As a result, the projects that come out of the ground concern relatively small areas, such as factory buildings or universities. But above all, the buildings heated in this way must be close to the data centers. A data center at the Val d’Europe site in the Paris region, for example, is connected to the heating network that serves the nearby business park.
A second obstacle hinders ambitions in this area. The peaks in data center activity, and therefore in their heat emissions, do not necessarily correspond to the periods of housing heating needs. Faced with this problem, Google may have found a solution. The tech giant unveiled a platform a few years ago that synchronizes its data center workloads with when low-carbon power sources are available.
However, before even thinking about using heat, data center operators prefer to focus their efforts on controlling their own energy consumption. The goal? Achieve maximum improvement of the energy efficiency indicator, commonly called “PUE”, for “Power Usage Effectiveness”.