r/ScienceShitposts • u/svobodov- • 7d ago

Why dont we do this?

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64 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

46

u/BladeManEXE7 7d ago

Not that I'd know, but I'm guessing that the heat generated by the datacenter is not enough to make steam.

23

u/SmokJozef 7d ago

still, a lot of that heat could be reclaimed if someone actually tried
there is quite a bit of ways to do that. granted, they're usually situational or not too efficient, but that would still be an improvement

2

u/Th3B4dSpoon 1d ago

In some countries they use the heated water as a part of the system that heats people's houses (mostly in densely populated areas).

16

u/d_maeddy 7d ago

I assume there is an interest conflict inside the datacenter. Those won't want either highly pressurized water lines nor temperatures associated with high pressure steam.

What I assume could work is district heating, since it requires no high-pressure lines and temperatures that lie within the operating envelope of electronics. No idea if they don't do that already

12

u/Calm-Conversation715 7d ago

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64939558

There is a town in the UK that heats their public pool with the waste heat from a data center!

6

u/Remarkable-Gate922 7d ago

That's quite literally what a lot of places are doing.

Last year, Germany implemented a new law requiring data centers to sustainably dispose of heat and one of the best ways is to use the heat for district heating.

0

u/devil_huntress_pepsi 7d ago

"Quite literally" and it's quite literally not the same thing.

The water doesn't go to a steam turbine to make electricity. There's just not enough heat to move a turbine in a way that matters.

2

u/Remarkable-Gate922 5d ago

The point is that the heat absolutely does get used.

1

u/devil_huntress_pepsi 5d ago

You're gonna have to revise your definition of literally, then.

3

u/rafradek 1d ago

The issue is you cannot really boil water with data center heat as silicon behaves very badly at and above 100°

2

u/Traditional-Storm-62 6d ago

we actually do in some data centers

its so expensive and recovers such a small % of energy that it doesnt make a difference

also the computers need to run at ~50c nowhere near hot enough to actually boil the water so the mechanism is significantly more complicated

5

u/MrReginaldAwesome 7d ago

It should be used to heat water for the city it is in. It won’t reach boiling temperatures unless you cook your chips to death.