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Comment by mrexroad

10 hours ago

> This "waste heat" system is a closed loop of efficiency. The 60+ kilowatts of heat energy produced by a storage cluster is not a byproduct to be eliminated but a resource to be harvested.

Are there any other data centers harvesting waste heat for benefit?

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mrexroad

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miduil  9 hours ago

Yes, plenty - sometimes data centers are built together with apartment or office complexes for this particular purpose. Unfortunately that already pinpoints the core limitation, due to the low-temperature of the data centers. The higher the temperature difference is, the more affective heating becomes - with air cooled systems it requires preparation to ensure that can be used for heating.

Also data centers need physical space, and often - you need heating where there is not a lot of space (cities), and for "district heating" you need higher temperatures usually.

stingraycharles  8 hours ago

I know that ~ 15 years ago we were already using datacenters in The Netherlands that were used to heat houses in a city.

I do vaguely remember that the economics of it all were not great, but it’s definitely a thing for quite a while already.