Germans Can Get Free Heating From the Cloud

Posted by timothy on Tuesday November 11, 2014 @05:17AM from the not-just-free-water dept.

judgecorp writes The idea of re-using waste server heat is not new, but German firm Cloud&Heat seems to have developed it further than most. For a flat installation fee, the company will install a rack of servers in your office, with its own power and Internet connection. Cloud&Heat then pays the bills and you get the heat. As well as Heat customers, the firm wants Cloud customers, who can buy a standard OpenStack-based cloud compute and storage service on the web. The company guarantees that data is encrypted and held within Germany — at any one of its Heat customers' premises. In principle, it's a way to build a data center with no real estate, by turning its waste heat into an asset. A similar deal is promised by French firm Qarnot.

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Re:Great in the winter .. by Translation+Error · 2014-11-11 05:51 · Score: 4, Informative

From the article:

And the unit is also arranged to vent excess heat outside in summer when no heating is required.

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When someone says, "Any fool can see ..." they're usually exactly right.
Re:Great in the winter .. by kuldan · 2014-11-11 05:58 · Score: 5, Informative

No, to put it into perspective, power in Germany costs about double than in the US - I pay around 0.30€/0.40$ for power per kw/h in Germany, and I'm with the cheapest provider for the whole region...
Re:Great in the winter .. by Uecker · 2014-11-11 06:30 · Score: 3, Informative

The additional cost for renewables for German consumers in 2014 is 6.24 ct/kWh (and parts of the industry is exempt) which is less than other taxes paid on electricity. While solar is still expensive (but went down a lot) wind is clearly one of the cheapest source of energy.