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.

Comments

Not new

[markdavis]

>"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.

Re:Not new

[Rei]

If it "just makes economic sense", why does the US do it so little? This is one thing I never got about the US. You drive through a city (or the countryside around one) and there's factories and powerplants belching clouds of hot steam on a winter's day, and then all over the same city you have people burning natural gas to heat their homes. I mean, what the heck, America?

Here in Iceland we produce power from geothermal water, which means a thermal power plant, like any other. But once the water's gone through turbines we put it to use - plants that are "reasonably close" to cities (generally under a 30 minute drive or so) pipe the water to them for home heating, while ones in more remote places usually are used for "nature spas" or greenhouse heating or the like. Peoples' homes get hot water piped to them as well as cold, and it's cheap. Almost too cheap - there's IMHO not enough incentive to do weather sealing and the like.

There's nothing magical about geothermal heat that lets you pipe it to homes while other kinds of heat must be thrown away.

This technology is very old

[gweihir]

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.