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New Data Center Will Heat Homes In London
1sockchuck writes "The heat generated by thousands of servers at the new Telehouse West data center in London will soon be used to heat nearby houses and businesses. The Greater London Authority has approved a plan in which waste heat from the colocation facility will be used in a district heat network for the local Docklands community. The project is expected to produce up to nine megawatts of power for the local community."
The Final Sentence of TFA: "The GLA (Greater London Authority) said that the agreed solution represents the best possible outcome within the specific constraints of the scheme and accords with the objectives of London Plan policy 4A.6."
You know, lavishing praise on a project like that is going to make all the other projects jealous.
Start a happiness pandemic
It'll work all year round! You'll never feel cold in July ever again, and you may not even need to use your oven to make a roast.
Cold here. Going to turn up the thermostat with some chess online.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
It's how we used to heat the offices neighboring our server room (and I'm sure many many people did it before I did). Glad to see them using it on a larger scale to save a bit of dosh.
That's a hot idea. Hope the discussion surrounding its merits doesn't get too heated, as alternative energy sources are really starting to heat up.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
So what happens to these people's heat source if the data center is shut down or becomes obsolete in the future? I would expect the homes to be around much longer than a data center might.
Then can you use the electricity to power the computers?
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I'm pretty sure the laptop i'm using right now could do a better job. Plus, I don't have to worry about my children's future.
I smell a new routing protocol that redirects traffic to the cold parts of the world
if you stop reading slashdot your grandmother freezes to death?
Ages ago (60s or early 70s), a large aluminum company built a new HQ building (in Richmond, IIRC). They ran the numbers on computer-cooling vs building-heating, and made the computers an integral part of the equation (downscaling the heating plant accordingly). You see where this is going...
As the move approached, the DP guys saw an opportunity, and canceled their PO to Armonk... opting instead for an Amdahl, I believe. Winter came, and people started wearing coats at their desks. My friend who worked there reported that they were hastily building a kluge auxiliary heating plant with insulated ducts running across a parking lot.
Of course, the Docklands project doesn't sound like it's making any assumptions about the amount of waste heat, just doing something useful with it. But I hadn't thought of that paleo-computing tale in decades and had to pass it along.
Sometime ago, I had a conversation with someone who was complaining how inefficient his computer was; that 90% of the energy was turned into heat. My reply: "But doesn't that make it a very efficient heater?"
As with anything written by a reporter, engineering details are all f'ed up.
"The project is expected to produce up to nine megawatts of power for the local community."
No, the project will probably pipe 9MW of heat from the server farm over to the housing complex. Hopefully they can use 9MW of heat continuously, summer and winter.
âoeThe energy savings will equate to boiling 3,000 kettles continuously,â
Um - that's a really funny way of thinking about saving energy. 9Mw/3000= 3kw/kettle. That's a hell of a kettle.
For anyone who thinks that running a computer in their house to heat it is clever, you would do a lot better (price AND CO2 wise) just running a furnace or your heat pump. Resistance heating is the WORST way to heat a house.
If you're going to be producing the heat anyway and can find a use for it like this, please do! Don't think that because you CAN use a computer for a heater means that it makes sense.
+++ ATH0 +++
I suppose that they did investigate the matter, but I wonder how this works. It's clear that there are a lot of watts being dissipated in the datacenter, but the problem is that they are dissipated against room temperature air. In order to heat houses with that, you have to use a heat pump which converts a heat flow at room temperature into a 65 C water that can easily be transported over large distances.
Normally, an airconditioning works as a heat pump that absorbs the heat by evaporating refrigerant slightly below room temperature (say 10 C), then compressing it so that it can condense and release the heat in an outdoor radiator at 40 C (ambient temperature up to 35 C). An ideal heat engine would be able to do this with an efficiency of 313 K/(40 C-10 C) = 10, which means that in order to displace 10 W of heat, you need to put in 1 W of mechanical work. I believe that a practical air-conditioning heat pump has an efficiency of 4 or so. Now in order to release the heat against 65 C (condensor temperature 75 C) instead of 35 C, the efficiency would halve. The work that you have to put into this heat engine comes from a power plant which itself has only 35% efficiency. So the balance would be:
Standard datacenter:
Server heat production: P
A/C electricity consumption: 0.25*P
Heat from burning fuel in power plant: 3.75*P
Datacenter with residential heating:
Server heat production: P
Heat pump electricity consumption: 0.6*P
Heat output to homes: 1.6*P
(gain: 1.6*P) Heat in power plant: 4.8*P (extra cost: 1.05*P)
Net gain: 0.55*P. For that you have to do all the infrastructure of big insulated hot-water pipes to residential areas and special heat pumps. It's not clear to me that this will pay off (in money and in environmental cost).
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
Cogeneration (or combined heat and power) can increase the efficiency of fossil fuel plants by a factor of 2 (from 50% to 93% efficiency mention in this Times article). The downside is that the the piping infrastructure investment needed is huge. Maybe this data center powered heating scheme can give it a leg up.
Karma: Good! Napster: Baad!
Modern kettles do consume 3kW, they have these huge, flat elements that boil very fast.
It's actually more efficient, as less heat will be lost from the body of the kettle during the boil cycle, because it has less time.
I'm an Aussie living in Melbourne so I get the joke. Occasionaly we get a news report of a London heat wave with a few days around 30degC, old people are dropping dead and young people are splashing around half naked in city fountains. It seem bizzare since a hot day here is 10-15degC hotter and we don't have dramas with old people until it gets around 40 or above.
A few years back I went on my first trip to the UK (at the end of July) we had a 3 day stop over in Hong Kong on the way. Hong Kong was as unbearable as Darwin is in the wet season, 30-35 deg, no breeze and near 100% humidity. As we were approaching London the pilot announced the temprature in London had just broken it's record maximum temp ( 32degC IIRC ). The wife and I snickered at each other...the english have no idea what hot is... We stopped snickering as soon we walked out of the airport and hit a wall of warm humid air that was exactly like Hong Kong or Darwin, the only weather difference between the three places was the pollution levels.
Of course the reason for the discomfort is high humidity from the massive ocean currents that bring warm water from the Gulf of Mexico.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
so I gather they are converting the excess heat to electricity
No. AC heat is "low grade". That is it's a few degrees above ambient so it'd be wildly inefficient to try to generate electricity from it. Heat can be measured in Watts just as electricity can.
e.g.
A typical 1gW nuclear power station will produce about 2gW of heat for each 1gW of electricity (35% efficiency or so). This is "waste" heat, though of course, it could be used to power adsorption chillers or used for industrial processes or domestic space and water heating, usually it's pumped directly into an ocean or river. Our power infrastructure is highly inefficient, about 60% at the best power stations. Of the approx 40% of total energy which does get turned into electricity, most of this is used for stuff like Air Conditioning, which is simply heat management. Refrigeration, which is heat management. Space heating, which is heat management.
We spend a lot of our time and money simply moving heat around (which is what they're doing in the article). This would be less of a problem if we were better at insulating things, there's actually no reason that the nearby houses should even need this heat, it's simply poor design.
Deleted
A bit off-topic, but I was amused to find out that here in the UK so many people turn their kettles on at 7:30pm for a cup of tea that sometimes they have to bring online a link from the French power grid to supply the extra power; apparently there is a guy who has to keep watch every day at 7:30 and if the power generation levels become serious enough he brings the French link online.
Pretty much every building big and small in Belltown, Downtown, First Hill and parts of Capitol Hill are heated by one of these "communist" steam companies.
Sadly, most of the 1930's brick apartments used to have steam heat. Most were not part of Seattle Steam, but used their own private boiler. Like with you, these were ripped out in the 70's and 80's and replaced with (now very expensive) electric heaters or if you were lucky some big fan with a gas flame at the bottom. Why? Probably so they could lower your rent not having to include heat (or more likely, just keep rent the same and pocket the difference). Course, the heat they provided would have been cheaper overall... electric heat is extremely expensive.
I was lucky enough to live an building that still had "free heat" and it was great. My electric bill was only $15 a month. Plus the radiators would leak steam just enough to humidify the apartment in the winter. Cats love them too because they can sleep on top of ones that have shielding.
Interestingly, the landlady of that apartment said the building used to have gas stoves as well but those were also replaced in the 70's and 80's with electric ranges. Why? So they didn't have to take on the gas bill either. Keep in mind they didn't have individual meters for gas in the 1930's and it be almost impossible to "re-wire" all the gas-lines to meter them.
Typically the only communal things left in apartments are sewer, water and garbage.
PS: For some reason they liked to paint over the mahogany trim in the 80's as well. That and they had a penchant for carpeting over hardwood floors. I swear, nothing good came out of the 80's whatsoever... not a god damn thing.
PPS: Almost all of the old 1930's apartments still have their original iceboxes.