alt Hacker News> This "waste heat" system is a closed loop of efficiency. The 60+ kilowatts of heat energy produced by a storage cluster is not a byproduct to be eliminated but a resource to be harvested.
Are there any other data centers harvesting waste heat for benefit?
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Yes, plenty - sometimes data centers are built together with apartment or office complexes for this particular purpose. Unfortunately that already pinpoints the core limitation, due to the low-temperature of the data centers. The higher the temperature difference is, the more affective heating becomes - with air cooled systems it requires preparation to ensure that can be used for heating.
Also data centers need physical space, and often - you need heating where there is not a lot of space (cities), and for "district heating" you need higher temperatures usually.
Yandex had a data center in Finland,, not sure if it's still operational. It was heating 1500 homes with 4 MW.
https://www.euroheat.org/dhc/knowledge-hub/datacentre-suppli...
I know that ~ 15 years ago we were already using datacenters in The Netherlands that were used to heat houses in a city.
I do vaguely remember that the economics of it all were not great, but it’s definitely a thing for quite a while already.
The EU mandates that all large data centres built/commissioned from July this year will make use of waste heat:
https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2024/germany/rechenzent...