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.
You can do this up to a point but if it looks like you're actually making a profit it might raise questions eventually. Keeping enough to cover one year's operating costs is pretty common though.
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.
I feel like this is one of those things that sounds good, but it's not. It's probably cheaper to build it far away from residential areas, and it's probably better for the people living there to not live too close to a data center.
The new ones are being built with massive numbers of unpermitted gas turbines with the exhaust filters removed, because there's not enough electricity and there isn't enough grid power and exhaust filtering costs money. So they're giving entire nearby towns asthma. They're also so loud the whole town can't sleep. Data centers were, and still can be, one of the cleanest industries - but the ones being built in this AI wave are not.
why must we tear up undeveloped areas for data centers instead of backfilling vacant industrial areas? Humanity will never rest until all of the world is a brownfield
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?
An outdoor heated pool that’s open all winter in a cold climate would be a destination worth a drive. A rather decadent use of energy otherwise, it’d be a good use for waste heat. There’s prior art in the Blue Lagoon in Iceland, a destination spa that uses water from a geothermal power plant.
The best waterparks in Tucson, AZ were on the outskirts of the city and worked great as a place to "travel" to for the parents as the kids would be wiped out on the way back. Breakers....Justins....how i miss those days of running around on hot pavement or gravel in bare feat only to also step on some cactus...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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%
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...
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.
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.
Some heat pumps do this. E.g. Panasonic Aquarea EcoFleX. When cooling the house, the domestic hot water tank is used to dump heat into (up to a certain temperature).
Linus Tech Talk (LTT) did a whole series on doing this on the pool at the channel hosts’ house. Extravagant home upgrades are a frequent topic on that YouTube channel… business expense write off yada yada. My general takeaway was, yikes, all that piping and infrastructure would be a nightmare to maintain and will likely just be closed off whenever an issue comes up (or he sells). I’m no expert, but I am a home owner, and have come to form a deep appreciation for maintaining simplicity when it comes to the operation of your house.
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.
I have connected the radiator of my homeserver liquid cooling setup to the heat exchanger of my hot water heat pump. Not sure how efficient it is, but I get a measurable drop in CPU temperatures while the heat pump runs.
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.
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.
> "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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
- Revenue: $25.01M
- Expenses: $25M
So "small savings" like this can add up for them.
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.
Even steel plants which deal with significantly higher waste heat gradients rarely bother with recovering energy.
Landauer's principle says that even if we could build computers to work at those temperatures, they'd need more power anyway.
There are uses for low grade heat but they require colocation and careful design, which costs more than just dumping the heat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuQRxatte5g
For comparison, an IC engine has a Carnot efficiency of something like 80% on paper, but the reality you get is only 20-30%
We can just use data centers for heating too...maybe turn around all these protests against them
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...
Presumably you read this very recently, since it's mentioned at the end of the article.
[1] https://www.computerwoche.de/article/2690747/rechenzentrum-h...
[2] https://stefan.schueller.net/posts/kva-winterthur/
You mean server.
https://help.abathhouse.com/hc/en-us/articles/16748674443924...
Air conditioners could do it too, right? Pump heat into a water reservoir instead of just throwing it away?
Some heat pumps do this. E.g. Panasonic Aquarea EcoFleX. When cooling the house, the domestic hot water tank is used to dump heat into (up to a certain temperature).
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
What about running the compute workloads of the municipality instead?
"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.
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!