Computers have tendencies of consuming several hundred watts of power and yours truly may have forced one or two to operate at higher speeds and consume even more. But even if your PCs generate a lot of heat, it’s nothing compared to what powerful servers emit in their rack-mounted enclosures. All this heat normally goes to waste and you would think there is something better you could do with it, and there is. The British has come up with a system where huge data centers help heat nearby buildings.
The London authorities have approved a plan to let Telehouse West Data center in Dockland contribute to the heating of homes close to the server halls. Server central that cost $180 million to build produces near 9 megawatt of heat for the Docklands area, which is about the same as keeping 3000 boiling tea pots.
Even if similar projects are already running, using heat from server halls for heating houses, the Telehouse project is the most extensive so far says Data Center Knowledge.
“The Telehouse project is the most ambitious effort yet to reuse the excess heat from data centers. IBM has designed a data center in Switzerland that that uses waste heat to warm a nearby community swimming pool. Researchers from Notre Dame University placed a rack of high-performance computing nodes at a local municipal greenhouse, the South Bend Greenhouse and Botanical Garden, to help heat the flowers and plants in the facility.”
