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Amazon: Heat From Data Centers Will Be Used as a Furnace (vox.com)
Vox reports on Amazon's recent push for "corporate sustainability":
It plans to have 15 rooftop solar systems, with a total capacity of around 41 MW, deployed atop fulfillment centers by the end of this year, with plans to have 50 such systems installed by 2020. Amazon was the lead corporate purchaser of green energy in 2016. That year, it also announced its largest wind energy project to date, the 253 MW Amazon Wind Farm Texas. Overall, the company says, it has "announced or commenced construction on wind and solar projects that will generate a total of 3.6 million megawatt hours (MWh) of renewable energy annually."
But here's the most interesting part. GeekWire reports: Amazon is moving ahead with a unique plan to use heat generated from data centers in the nearby Westin Building to warm some of its new buildings downtown. The system transfers the heat from the data centers via water piped underground to the Amazon buildings. The water is then returned to the Westin Building once it's cooled down to help cool the data centers. The setup will be unusual. "Certainly there are other people using waste heat from server farms but you don't hear a lot about tying it in with buildings across the street from each other," said Seattle City Councilmember Mike O'Brien.
But here's the most interesting part. GeekWire reports: Amazon is moving ahead with a unique plan to use heat generated from data centers in the nearby Westin Building to warm some of its new buildings downtown. The system transfers the heat from the data centers via water piped underground to the Amazon buildings. The water is then returned to the Westin Building once it's cooled down to help cool the data centers. The setup will be unusual. "Certainly there are other people using waste heat from server farms but you don't hear a lot about tying it in with buildings across the street from each other," said Seattle City Councilmember Mike O'Brien.
>"But here's the most interesting part. GeekWire reports: Amazon is moving ahead with a unique plan to use heat generated from data centers in the nearby Westin Building to warm some of its new buildings downtown. The system transfers the heat from the data centers via water piped underground to the Amazon buildings"
Factories and businesses that generate waste heat have been doing that for at least two centuries now, all over the world. Where I work, some 80 years ago they ran waste heat steam lines from the laundry building to other places on the campus, including 1/4 mile away for some residences. Data centers have also been doing it in many places for many years both on and off capus. http://www.datacenterknowledge...
It is great to hear, but really nothing new.
"Certainly there are other people using waste heat from server farms but you don't hear a lot about tying it in with buildings across the street from each other" ummm no, this is actually the common use case when heating buildings from datacenter waste heat, in fact I can't think of an example where it was anything but this type of setup (I am sure there are but they would not be the norm as most datacenters don't have large office spaces in to make it worthwhile)
Industrial waste heat too. For example in my home town, waste heat from a trash incineration facility is combined with waste heat from chemical plant Akzo Nobel, and provides a number of homes & other buildings in the area with heating and hot water. Overview here:
Warmtenet Hengelo
There exist many similar projects in my country & elsewhere.
And it has been used for typical city-wide distances for a long time. Where the heat comes form is unimportant as long as it is available with reasonable dependability or there are fallback alternate heat sources. This whole system was probably available from a catalog already. May have been an European catalog, but still.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Maybe they don't have the Internet in Seattle though, so they don't know.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/u...
Monstrous working conditions. SCREW AMAZON!
Although as others have noted people have been using waste heat from all sorts of things for a long time in similar ways, I was wondering - why are there not more buildings that sit on top of the data centers to use heat? It seems like it would be possible to use the heat even more directly. In particular, a greenhouse on top of a data center in colder climates would seem like a nice mixture.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's the holiday season... so AMAZON IN THE NEWS!!! AMAZON IS DOING GLOBAL GOOD!!!! AMAZON IS DOING X, Y, AND Z!!!
All this Amazon press is just keeping their name in your brain so you shop there during the Christmas season.
As others have said, this isn't new.
It's called a district heating system.
3.6 million megawatt hours (MWh) of renewable energy annually
The power industry seems to act like there's a law that says they have to somehow include an "hours" factor in every physical quantity they discuss.
Why not just call it what it is: an average of 411 megawatts.
It is not a new idea even in computing.
In 1981, I worked a summer job at Charter Information Corp. in Austin TX. They'd recently moved to Austin from Woburn MA. They were a small data processing service bureau, and ran a Xerox Sigma 6 computer.
In Massachusetts, they'd run a duct, with a valve, from the waste heat outflow from the Sigma 6 cooling system to their building HVAC ducts. They had NEVER had to light their oil burner for office heat in the winter: waste heat from the Sigma 6 was more than adequate to keep their offices quite comfortable.
most datacenters don't have large office spaces
Which is why Cloud&Heat brings the water-cooled server rack to the office space.
I can think of a reason for using "watt hours per year" other than that it's what people are used to from their electric bill. I hear "watts" and think instantaneous power, or at least an average over a period no longer than one second. But the familiar renewable power sources (wind and solar) are anything but constant over the course of a day or year, making use of an instantaneous power measurement misleading. The "watt hours per year" unit emphasizes that a power measurement is a long-term average.
In other news, Donald Trump has invented the idea of using extra Federal government spending to, as he puts it, "prime the pump" of investment spending by businesses.
You could still use the land around for solar (which most do already anyway) , and you can make greenhouse glass that contains a translucent solar power material to gain some energy from it - probably not as efficient as full panels but close enough to make the project worthwhile, not to mention you would have a lot more surface area generating electricity from a dome than just panels on a roof.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Your machines are running _WAY_ too hot!
Assuming you want to keep your CPUs under 45 C then the returning water will be at most 37 - 40 C. I would guess closer to 37C. You then pipe it a couple of km and assuming no loss then you are heating a building to 21 or 22 C. Usually your return water on your home radiator is close 40 C, so warmer than input temperature Amazon will provide. It's do able but you would be pumping so much water that I'm not sure it works. I guess if you add in a heat pump? Still by the time you count the power pumping the water your gain is going to be marginal. Also most of the year Seatle might be damp but it's not really cold. This idea works with other industries that are boiling water but amazon isn't generating anything with a big enough temperature difference to make sense.
It can be used to incinerate the workers made redundant by robots! And their families too, so they won't have to face poverty! It's called progress, embrace it!
At least here in Finland piping hot water into buildings is a common form of heating in the cities, and there are experiments in using the same system for cooling in the summer. There is nothing particularly special in the idea of plugging as server farm as a heat source.
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.
Man has changed the albedo of the Earth and will continue to do so. There should be a total accounting of sources of heat rise on the Earth, including the effect of the heat retention of growing cities, roads and technologies like solar panels. (You may laugh here)
E Proelio Veritas.
The technology isn't new. Might be a new thing to North America, but where I work we've been heating others for years http://www.renewableenergyfocus.com/view/29800/uk-s-largest-single-phase-district-energy-scheme-completed-in-leicester/
Its good to see that this kind of thing is getting some thought, and making it into the media though. There are a number of benefits for people, organisations, and the environment.