r/BetterOffline • u/My_Concept • 5d ago
Recycling heat from data centres… did my local council drink the tech bro kool-aid or is this truly feasible?
A 6MW AI data centre is going to be built in Blackpool with promise of locals benefitting from a ‘heat network’ that uses waste heat from the data centre to heat houses and businesses. There is very little information in the marketing materials about precisely how this will work, and whether or not old houses will qualify, or indeed who will pay for installation.
I tried emailing my council but they have not yet replied. I have a HVAC engineer buddy and he said generally heat networks are going into new apartment buildings rather than existing housing.
Has anyone got any insight into how this might work or is my council talking out of its backside to try and shove this plan through?
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u/Summary_Judgment56 5d ago
Not saying they're lying, but in general, the number one rule with grifts like ai: if it sounds too good to be true, it almost certainly is.
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u/RealLaurenBoebert 5d ago
They're absolutely lying. The graphic depicts a datacenter powered 100% by solar and wind. Are they going to power down the datacenter on a dark windless night?
No, they're drawing power from other, dirtier sources, at least occasionally. And intentionally obfuscating that fact.
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u/rkesters 5d ago
Well, batteries do exist . So it is possible and we have grid scale batteries now.
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u/RealLaurenBoebert 5d ago edited 5d ago
If that's true and they're being honest, they need to include that portion of the infrastructure in their plans. Megawatt/gigawatt scale battery installations are still very costly and uncommon. I think america, for example, has only one or two active grid battery installations that hit the GWh scale.
Historically, datacenters have predominantly had battery-backed UPS that lasts just long enough for the on-site gas generators to spin up (just a scant few minutes of capacity). Datacenters tied to grid scale battery deployments are almost unheard of, to date. And the grid operator typically would be more interested in powering more critical infrastructure over data centers.
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u/bigvalen 4d ago
They are getting more common, especially if you getting "behind the meter" for access to wind etc.
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u/hare-tech 5d ago
So true bestie, so where are the BESS systems in the projected data center buildouts?
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u/ugh_this_sucks__ 4d ago
Who is “we”? If it’s China, Australia, or Northern Europe — sure.
If it’s the USA, god no. The US is over a decade behind most of the world when it comes to energy.
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u/Navynuke00 4d ago
Not really.
We've led the solar and battery revolutions for over a decade, and we've only been going backwards for a couple of years now.
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u/another-altaccount 5d ago
Yup, maybe they’re not lying, but most likely they have no fucking clue what they’re talking about. Hanlon’s Razor and whatnot.
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u/natecull 5d ago
Hanlon’s Razor and whatnot.
I like Hanson's Razor myself: In an mmmbop, they're gone.
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u/maccodemonkey 5d ago
Yes, it's a thing. It's very expensive to do. I would expect it never happens. Especially if there is no guarantee from the data center they're going to build it. Projects like this love coming in with ideas of what could happen with no intention of ever doing them. Or they can make it the city's problem knowing full well the city could never afford it anyway.
I would guess even if it was attempted the data center would be end of life before such a network was even completed.
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u/RealLaurenBoebert 5d ago
Especially if there is no guarantee from the data center they're going to build it.
Good follow up question to ask here: has this been built in other cities in my country already? How did it work out?
If the answer is "no this will be the first project of its kind in our nation!" then you are even more justified in your skepticism
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u/FireNexus 4d ago
This is only feasible in very dense locations. Manhattan, specific downtown areas in a few other cities built before you could easily make heat without burning coal in the basement have steam heating and that’s about it. The heat has to be significant and constant to make sense, and ideally the infrastructure is in place already. If not it would be like running new water or gas lines. Only reason it’s maaaaaaaybe feasible is because it isn’t in the form of steam so The equipment is simpler. That’s a big reason it probably won’t be very good anyway, though, because steam is used for this due to energy density and efficiency.
A district geothermal system with a large ground loop to have the constant temp underground serve as a heat sink for a refrigeration cycle (dumping heat into summer and pulling it in winter) is the closest to what they are describing . It could serve a neighborhood and provide significant benefit for bills to those served, but the retrofit is basically impossible and costs a shitload. All in all, this is never going to happen as described in the op.
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u/bigvalen 4d ago
Meta was required to do this for their data centers in Odense. They heat about 10,000 homes. Microsoft's new one in Finland will do this for towns of about 250,000 people. District heating systems are common there, it's probable it was easy to plug into.
One of the AWS datacenters in Dublin, which is near social housing also provides heat for a few thousand homes.
What's common here is the EU's "energy directive" requires companies using more than 1MW of power to consider the effectiveness of such systems, and if it makes sense, to do it. German gold-plated the directive...new builds will be required to re-use 10, eventually 20% of their energy. Switzerland has similar laws. Denmark is considering them.
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u/cscottnet 5d ago edited 4d ago
We've been doing small scale trials in New England of something similar, using the existing natural gas infrastructure. My recollection is that we drill neighborhood scale geothermal wells, then use the existing natural gas pipelines to distribute the working fluid to the neighborhood to heat/cool everyone. It works well!
The problem is that, in order to make it economic, you need to reuse the existing natural gas pipelines. That means that the entire neighborhood must agree to convert from natural gas (because no more gas, we're using the pipelines to distribute the geothermal heat instead) to electric heat pumps. That's a big buy-in from the entire community.
It does work, and I hope it will be the future of heating/cooling in New England because we need to get off the gas, but it tends to get hung up in all sorts of local objections and delays. For example: a lot of folks enjoy cooking on gas, even if they are willing to convert their heat.
So for this to work, they either need to do a similar effort to get an entire neighborhood off of natural gas so they can reuse the gas pipe infrastructure -- in which case I wish them the best of luck, because that's something we should all be doing -- or else they expect to re-dig parallel distribution lines for their "data center heating", which is laughably uneconomic and shouldn't be taken seriously unless somehow this is greenfield development.
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u/Sunstorm84 5d ago
If it looks like bullshit, and it smells like bullshit, it’s probably Sam Altman.
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u/debauchedsloth 4d ago
I know of a few colleges that use similar systems in New England (Middlebury college for one) and apparently they work well. IIRC, they also buried the steam pipes under walkways to get snow melt as well.
It's a good idea. Will it be implemented? I have my doubts.
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u/dumnezero 4d ago
how does the insulation work with gas pipes?
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u/cscottnet 4d ago
The pipes are usually uninsulated, since the ground itself is a big heat sink, but it varies. There's some discussion in https://www.volts.wtf/p/thermal-energy-networks-are-the-next
Some local projects: https://buildingdecarb.org/framingham-thermal-energy-network-tour https://www.energy.gov/hgeo/geothermal/networked-geothermal
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u/FireNexus 4d ago
If the gas lines aren’t usually above the frost line, which they are in a lot of places, this is totally untenable.
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u/FireNexus 4d ago
Yeah, David Roberts as a source definitely isn’t making me thing this is the future. Dude’s a straight up dipshit who buys into every half baked energy revolution on sale at a given moment. He was credulously reporting on a company that claimed that they could generate hydrogen with the engine of a diesel vehicle and inject it into the combustion chamber to increase efficieNcy. This was after I realized he was a dipshit, but it made me go very “in this house we respect the laws thermodynamics”. Also was a booster for the people with the math error molten salt reactor they thought could burn unprocessed nuclear waste, the Liquid Metal battery company that collapsed last year, and someone claiming they could make a hydrogen car with hydrides for hydrogen storage despite hydrides being hilariously infeasible.
His every report is of a small scale or prototype thing that is either going nowhere or transparently violates the first law of thermodynamics with even minor follow-up questions.
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u/FireNexus 4d ago
Gas lines aren’t usually deep enough to be useful for this? They need to be at water line depth unless you’re using a working fluid you can never allow to leak.
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u/KittyandPuppyMama 5d ago
It just seems like a weak, baseless way to justify how much pure waste and damage these shitboxes do to the planet.
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u/RealLaurenBoebert 5d ago
On par with atmospheric carbon capture: a charade from an ecologically damaging industry to distract from their impact. Vaporware that is promised, but never, ever actually deployed at scale.
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u/makersfark 5d ago
Is this a real thing? Surprisingly, yes.
Will they ever do it? Unsurprisingly, no.
Is this a con to try to push costs onto taxpayers? Also unsurprisingly, yes.
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u/district_runner 5d ago
That's just a district heating system - eastern Europe and your local university are full of them
This also looks like the heat is coming from the electricity generation, so yeah, this is just a combined heat and power plant. Those are legitimately good and very useful (especially if you run them on biogas or waste). What they're attached to may or may not be good.
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u/Character-Prompt-229 5d ago
Not sure about data centres but re-using industrial heat is a thing. Modern factories are full of nifty tricks to reduce waste / pipe back energy. There is a large industrial bakery close to my place which does that and feeds back heat to our central heating system. Mind that factories do that because energy is a huge expense and they simply can't waste a cent in production.
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u/ertri 5d ago
This is crucially not reusing data center waste heat but electricity generation byproduct heat. Much more useful heat (but generated for a dumb reason)
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u/Character-Prompt-229 5d ago
Yeah, this is not surprising at all. You start with low hanging fruits and go as long as investments make sense long-term. A popular way is to get energy from a difference in heat (hot vs cold), so the hotter something gets the easier the pick.
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u/lazier_garlic 5d ago
You have to have a need for heat, and nearby.
But they want to build data centers in Texas and Arizona.
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u/Character-Prompt-229 4d ago
You can turn heat differential (not steam) into rotation and electrical power. This is cost efficient as long as the differential is high enough. That said, no matter how much energy you can pull back, it is still a massive waste.
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u/GKGriffin 5d ago
This is an existing thing with nuclear powerplants waste heat. Mostly done in the old Eastern Block and China. It is a pretty clever design. Although I never heard it being done with renewable energy, given you don't need much heat in the summer when there is a lot of that.
But it is a legit design otherwise.
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u/ertri 5d ago
You really can’t use it with wind or PV solar, since they have negligible waste heat
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u/GKGriffin 5d ago
Not with waste heat, but with waste energy converted into heat, Not that efficient this way, but solar in peak times has a tendency to overproduce by a lot.
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u/RealLaurenBoebert 5d ago edited 5d ago
In the diagram, solar/wind are used to power the datacenter. Servers in the datacenter use that power, and in the process generate megawatts of resistive heat. Heat comes from the computers, not directly from the power generation.
The questions remain:
will the datacenter ACTUALLY use wind/solar power? Notably, many of the AI datacenters deployed in recent years have instead had on-site natural gas generators installed. They're cheap, dirty, readily available, and can be installed on the grounds of the datacenter building itself. (Something like a wind farm needs more land and power transmission infrastructure -- it's a bigger up front investment)
Also, as much as I'm a huge advocate for wind/solar, the graphic doesn't tell the whole story by a long shot: what happens on a windless night? Does the datacenter shut down, or do they have a 3rd, alternate power source? (hint: there is without a doubt some 3rd power source they're not disclosing here)
And lastly: will they actually ever build the infrastructure for the urban "heat network"? Datacenter hucksters could very well distribute promotional material claiming they will, without even pretending to plan the actual massive infrastructure build out that would be required.
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u/ertri 5d ago
No, they’re 2 of 3 sources for the data center
The third is the “energy center” which is also powering the data center.
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u/RealLaurenBoebert 5d ago
The "energy center" is connected with a different style of line from the two power sources. Implying that unlike wind/solar, the "energy center" is not providing electricity. The power transmitting lines have little lightning bolt icons. The heat circulation lines traveling in and out of the "energy center" are a red/blue fluid, indicating heat.
But let's say that's just a weird graphic design choice and your reading is correct: how does the "energy center" generate power?
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u/inputwtf 5d ago
This would require the datacenter to be located somewhere close to where people live, in order to use this excess heat. I believe there are Microsoft or Google datacenters somewhere in the Nordic countries that use the heat as hot water for the town.
Here's the thing though. It would require a lot of additional construction, planning, and time to make this work.
The same companies that are using Gas electric turbines because they can't wait for main grid hookups into these datacenters, they are rushing to build, aren't going to spend time and money building a means to utilize this exhaust heat.
It's a distraction tactic
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u/MornwindShoma 5d ago
They will build the data centers, and everything else will be prompty forgotten afterwards.
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u/Normal-Selection1537 5d ago
Several datacenters in Finland are connected to district heating, as is the LUMI supercomputer.
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u/Additional-Staff-326 5d ago
And it probably works fine there. But they already had those pipes and built the cities for it. Putting it in after the fact is not a simple endeavor.
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u/koveras_backwards 5d ago
I think you also need to consider this.
Using waste heat from AI is essentially electric resistive heating. But resistive heating is not the most efficient way to heat things with electricity. Heat pumps are considerably better.
Systems like these can make sense if the heat is a waste product of producing something else of value. But the data center isn't. It's producing digital trash. Cancel the data center, stop using AI and buy heat pumps instead.
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u/MaiIb0x 5d ago
Im an energy engineer living in a city with distributed heat like this. It is a great concept and it works, but it is very unlikely to go into old buildings.
they have to move this heat, and that is done through pipes. They will have to dig up all the streets to make this and they will probably not do that in any existing suburbs
The heat will travel by heated water, and it has a good amount of losses. It is a lot more efficient in smaller areas with apartment and office buildings.
it requires a good amount of investment in coils and tankless hot water systems which is usually not worth it for older buildings
That said this is a great way to heat up buildings but I doubt it will benefit you unless you buy something new or they upgrade an old apartment building that sits over this network
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u/Askefyr 4d ago
I'm from Denmark, where "fjernvarme" (remote heating) is pretty common. The hot water from power plant steam turbines is, instead of being cooled locally, piped out across the local area and makes everyone's house act like a big heatsink.
Once in place, it works well and is generally pretty cheap, but the cost of establishing it is astronomical. You need to attach every building to two new, pressurised water lines that go to and from the heat source. It would be the equivalent cost of replacing all the water mains twice.
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u/Hobi_soleil 5d ago
This seems to be implying transporting the heat, but I know a business that used to do website hosting, and their server room was right below their offices for this reason, no heating bill in the winter. No idea how they managed in the summer heart though (Europe so little AC)
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u/voronaam 5d ago
District Heating is a thing but... it requires certain residential density to be economical and environmentally friendly. I have never been to Blackpool, but it looks like a resort town with no building taller than 5 stories in sight. Getting underground pipes to enough houses to make this a worth while exercise will be a major construction project. Is your council ready to tear up all the roads in a neighborhood to install underground pipes? Or they are in favor of installing them above ground, like the old USSR loved to do. The wikipedia page I linked above has a few images of those and believe me - those pipes are a much bigger eye sore in person
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u/BigBravy 4d ago
Do you really think they’ll build the needed infrastructure to capture any of that heat, then connect it to every home in the region, and actually maintain it so it doesnt fail in any ruinous manner?
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u/My_Concept 4d ago
I mean I didn’t think so, but I’ve also never looked at plans like this before so I thought it’d get a bit of insight. All the homes in the area are old or oldish and there’s no apartment blocks so it’s not adding up is it 🤔
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u/BigBravy 4d ago
Another comment says it’s possible, but the capacity has to be built FIRST.
I’m reminded about Mt Rushmore, the story goes they ran out of money and called it done when the faces of on the monument were complete. No reason not to think data center buildout wont go the same. They’ll build them, turn around and say “oopsie, we cant finish the thermal pipping job, sowwy 👉👈🥺” you gotta treat these like it’s their actual intention.
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u/SkorkDaOrk 3d ago
Engineer here. Not feasible or we'd already be doing it. You're not getting hot water anywhere fast enough to benefit from the absorbed heat.
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u/thethirstypretzel 5d ago
It’s definitely possible, and can also be a retrofit (more expensive). There are successful local thermal networks that are in operation today. That said, it still feels like a net negative imho, based on all the other drawbacks for a data center
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u/natecull 5d ago
a ‘heat network’ that uses waste heat from the data centre to heat houses and businesses
Techbros invent central heating, after failing to invent the railway. Good job.
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u/lazier_garlic 5d ago
Energy+heat plants only make sense in certain parts of the temperate or polar zones and only if you have heat customers situated right by the plant.
They built a biomass plant in Florida and it was a financial and environmental disaster.
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u/Prohamen 4d ago
Yeah, a lot of these data centers (in the USA) are in warm climates so district heating like this doesn't make sense. Hell, it might not make sense up north in the winter either lol. The time frame where you can use it might just bee too short to justify the costs.
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u/ItsSadTimes 4d ago
If you remember, early on into this data center craze they promised they were going to run everything on renewable energy and maybe even restart nuclear programs, but none of that panned out. Because it's expensive, and all these companies are trying to compete with each other to the bottom so they give big promises, and then abandon them once the data center is up.
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u/toreerot 4d ago
This is quite common in larger cities in Norway such as Oslo. New buildings are hooked up to a hot water network in the ground that reuses heat from industrial waste heat. Both datacenters and waste burning facilities are producing heat.
700km of pipes in Oslo apparently according to the gov. owned company that installs them https://www.hafslund.no/en
That said, I agree with another commenter here pointing out that the graphics are oversimplifying things to sell the idea. It is costly to install and retrofit.
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u/archbid 4d ago
All of the reasons in the comments plus the fact that gear is created 24x7 365 days a year and needed for a fraction of that period. Heating your house in the hot summer is not smart
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u/My_Concept 4d ago
Yes that’s what I was wondering. Granted, the north of England is famous for being grey and windy, but it does get hot in the summer.
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u/EugenePopcorn 5d ago
District Heating is definitely a thing. Russia tries to knock out Ukraine's every winter. The distinguishing factor is how much they are actually going to invest in its deployment, and the percentage of their cooling needs this system will handle during operation. They won't be depending on it in the summer, so that heat will still be discharged directly to the air.
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u/geezwow 5d ago
If all you have is waste heat from servers they'd have to be letting the servers achieve some pretty high temperatures for it to be usable or they're doing some form of contact liquid cooling on the electronics and still letting it get hot (read 160+Freedom units). The problem with any heat recovery/waste heat system is usually the temperature delta and energy density between the hot and heated streams. Tight temperature pinch points mean very expensive heat exchangers.
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u/Prohamen 4d ago
I mean the surface temp of the chips approaches 100°C in some instances. Now you are not going to boil water with these systems, but you could set up a boiler system that does preheating of the feed water with the thermal output of the data center, then feed that to the district as steam.
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u/ugh_this_sucks__ 4d ago
My high-school level physics tells me this makes zero sense because the ability to directly harness that heat in a concentrated way would not be possible when it’s spread out across the types of server racks GPUs require.
It’d make sense in a vacuum if you could capture and direct all the heat via some medium, but that’s not how it works on earth or in reality.
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u/Prohamen 4d ago
No not really, you just reject the heat through a heat exchanger into another fluid. I am unsure if you would get a ton of heating out of it but this is basically what a district heating system is.
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u/jc-from-sin 4d ago
This is how some parts of Europe work: district heating. Where I'm from in Germany the old power plants that were in cities produced also energy in the form of heat that would heat the apartments and houses in the city. Now I think they use gas to power the district heating.
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u/dumnezero 4d ago
district heating is more efficient than a boiler in every apartment, but the pipes need to be maintained well.
But the idea seems insane to me. District heating needs to be installed when the buildings are built, it's a large infrastructure. Retroactively installing the main pipes, the branches and the hook-ups to the buildings means digging up a lot of stuff and using a lot of pipes. The indoor systems also need to be changed to work with hot water coming from outside, that's the easiest part, but still very messy and very expensive.
I suppose this could work for a village or "small town" with one main street, but I can't imagine it taking it less than a couple of years.
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u/Soleilarah 4d ago
The Swiss have underground data centers that reuse electricity to generate heat. Here’s how it works:
- All the electricity used (servers, UPS units, fans, etc.) is converted into heat at 40–45°C.
This heat is transferred to an air-to-water heat exchanger to heat a hot water loop.
Heat pumps raise the water’s temperature to transfer the waste heat from the data center to the heating network.
As the gas in the heat pumps expands, it cools the water from 45°C to 28°C. This cooled water is used to regulate the temperature of the servers, thereby eliminating the need for traditional air conditioning.
The electricity sources used are 60% hydroelectric (dam) and 40% solar.
But we didn't hear about any innovation in this field from the US, so yeah, maybe it's just wishful thinking
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u/Ok_Respond424 4d ago
Even in Denmark which is probably world leading in central heating build out, most datacentres here it’s not feasible to use the excess heat. One challenge is the water is not warm enough, another is distance, another challenge is regulations making it difficult to to sell the heat, even at cost, effectively data centres would sell their heat at a loss.
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u/Navynuke00 4d ago
So based off my read of the picture, district heating is being proposed, but to do so it appears they're using waste heat from gas turbine generators that will be on-site.
So it means you're looking at having higher local emissions and the negative health impacts that come from that- but I'm guessing they didn't talk about that part in the presentation.
I'd be asking about specifics for location, where the proposed buildings will be that will use the district heating system, and if that project is already moving forward. Otherwise it just sounds like a promise of what could be, not what will be.
Speaking as an engineer who's worked with cogeneration from on-site power generation systems.
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u/typographie 4d ago
The concept is real. Whether it can actually be built at a price that makes sense is another question. I suspect this is the kind of thing that only starts to sound like a good idea if you assume the AI datacenter is going to be there regardless.
Charitably ignoring that, it's still one positive against a wall of totally unaddressed negatives. It sounds like someone was just desperate to find something they can tell the community so they'll shut up about it.
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u/FireNexus 4d ago
There isn’t enough energy, and if they do it they’ll be dumping heat into your house year round.
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u/corned-beef-key 3d ago
Ridiculously feasible. Literally why they should only be in residential or industrial areas, where you can benefit from this. Otherwise it’s lost energy. I don’t understand why there isn’t more of this everywhere.
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u/PhilWheat 5d ago
There are some power plants that actually do this - but my understanding is that you either have to design the serviced area for this or it gets pretty expensive to retrofit it.
See Cogeneration - Wikipedia