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Datacenter heat reuse is a thing. Mostly in European countries with cold climates. Notably, Finland has a few datacenters like that (Remov, Telia). I believe so

Datacenter heat reuse is a thing. Mostly in European countries with cold climates. Notably, Finland has a few datacenters like that (Remov, Telia). I believe some countries might even mandate the feasibility study for reusing the heat for new datacenters. I have no idea why it's not everywhere, but I see some issues right off the bat: - you need a district heating system to dump the heat into, and to be really close to consumers - the integration into the heating system isn't free - heating supply doesn't match demand well (not seasonal; datacenter scaling depends on computing demand, heating is just a byproduct)

jve 3y ago
> heating supply doesn't match demand well Yes. However you still must run chillers that would dissipate heat into the environment with or without heat re-use. I was talking to one of DC technicians about this and mentioned - hey, if a chiller ever breaks down (they are redundant), one can (even in summer), put radiators to max to help dissipate heat from DC rooms. He said yes. I asked whether this is some actionable item on some risk plans or whatever - nop, that is not something that we depend on. And it would just extend the time to do something but not prevent from overheating.
henriks 3y ago
The new Azure region they’re building in the Helsinki region is also going to be used for district heating: https://news.microsoft.com/europe/2022/03/17/microsoft-announces-intent-to-build-a-new-datacenter-region-in-finland-accelerating-sustainable-digital-transformation-and-enabling-large-scale-carbon-free-district-heating/ https://news.microsoft.com/europe/2022/03/17/microsoft-annou...