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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.
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.
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.
Cool it, you two.
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?"
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!
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.
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