How waste heat can help get us off natural gas for good.

The urgency of our global sustainable energy transition has never been in sharper focus than it is now. Every possible strategy for accelerating our move away from fossil fuels needs to be pursued robustly, and that includes capturing and utilising the enormous quantities of heat currently going to waste from more than seven million data centres and tens of millions of industrial facilities around the world. It seems it's not as easy as it sounds though.

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Research Links

Mark Monroe article

Switch Datacenters

Facebook article

EU Cordis Article

Eindhoven University of Technology

UK 'ADSORB' Project

Industrial waste heat research paper

Data Centre waste heat research paper

NASA PCM video link

Dutch 'BENG' rules

UK BEIS paper

Top Ten countries for Data Centres

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[chrisminnoy]

For a few years I was the lucky ceo of a startup tackling that very problem. We developed edge nodes that could heat hot water from server waste heat and be placed in appartment buildings and homes, using fiber for node communication. While saving 80+ percent of primary energy, and working fine, the industry wasn't ready for this concept so we had to drop the project and focus on other stuff. A really missed opportunity.

[GordieGii]

Over 20 years ago the IBM Canada headquarters was reusing their heat. There was an enormous water tank under the building which was used (air coupled) to cool the computer center and heat the offices. Any residual heat was heat-pumped out at night when the air was cooler so the heat pumps didn't have to work as hard.

[cmk]

This is something I've been advocating for in Ireland the media attacks on Data Centres in Ireland has really mislead the general public on the potential benefits of waste heat for use in district heating, Dublin has enough to waste heat to provide heating & hot water to every household in Dublin with our current Data Centres. It's really disappointing this wasn't planned for before construction retrofitting will now be more difficult.

[MattyP]

This won't be related to the subject of this video directly, but oh well. I have to say, I discovered your channel a couple weeks ago after seeing a lot of climate doomerism & getting to a very very low place. This channel & it's level headed & realistic description of the problems, solutions & innovations has given me some genuine hope for the future. I still do get scared about it, & it's easy again to get sucked down into doomerism, but I just wanted to say thanks for lifting me when I was at my lowest, and showing that there are genuine signs of hope out there!

[morganspencer-churchill]

This would have been obvious to engineers 50 years ago. It's only the fact that it has been cheaper to burn hydrocarbons than recapture heat energy that has prevented it from being implemented.

[techobservations]

I've been mentioning much of this for many years. Some is the will to do it, other cases its about autonomy people feel they need.
District heating used to be more common in urban areas, often "steam heat" - the heat source often from gasificaton of coal to "town gas" for lighting and cooking. Additional urban manufacturing had steam driven power so there was lots of "waste steam" that had to be cooled.

Even at the beginning of electricity the steam driven generation provided district heating to capture another source of income as well as reduce the cost of cooling prior to re-use. When electricity generation moved away form the urban center (often related to smokestack issues) much of the district heating was abandoned and large cooling towers became the way to provide the heat differential to the steam turbines.

[SamiCoopers]

IDEAS: You could cover the roofs of data centers, located in cooler countries, with heated greenhouses. You could also have other secondary businesses that typically use heat, to then improve their efficiency, like washing, cooking, drying, sterilising or manufacturing of steel/glass/etc.

edit: greenhouse algae farm for bio fuel?

[b_uppy]

Essentially they could use heat exhanger units, inside, and outside.
The direct water heating could save a ton of fuel heating water. We figured out a large part of our power use was the water heater.
Probably the most practical is the salt/heat conversion system.

[joepaines]

This reminded me that last winter I was in a supermarket looking to buy a cold drink. The temperature outside was hovering around 1°C. I walked through the artificially heated environment and took a cold drink from an artificially cooled refrigerator. Someone must be able to come up with a less wasteful system than this

[rogerbarton]

Fantastic. Back in the 1970s I was involved in the installation of a mainframe computer system in a brand new building for our local university. The processor itself was water cooled and housed in a large series of cabinets, the heat being blown out into the atmosphere via fans & heat exchangers mounted on the roof.

At the same time a gas-fired heating system kept the building nice and warm.

Even then we (the computer engineers) were complaining about the waste of energy.

[Abitibidoug]

In recent times there's been a lot of complaining about the high cost of oil and gas. Maybe, at long, long last these high prices will persist and motivate us to use a lot of that waste heat that presently goes underutilized.

[merlijnchardon]

A couple of years ago I studied the topic of thermal storage in salt hydrates extensively. The main lesson I learned is the following:

It is important to keep in mind that the promising high storage capacity of salt hydrates assumes the availability of humid air that is required to release the stored heat from the salt. Humid air is typically not abundant in times of high demands for district heating. A major part of the energy released when the dried salt is humidified, actually results from the 'condensation' of water vapour from the air into the salt. If insufficient humid air is present, liquid water has to be evaporated to create the vapour for such humid air, resulting in pre-investing about half of the stored energy just in order to release it. If this pre-invested heat is taken from the salt hydrates, the effective energy density is substantially reduced.
Typical values for the salt hydrate studied on at the TU Eindhoven are:
Temperature required for full regeneration: 100-105'C
Typical temperature released when humidified in vacuum conditions: 40-60C'
Thermal storage capacity salt hydrate: 1.3 GJ/m3 (assuming packing density of 100%, typical practical systems achieve 60-70%)
Amount of water vapour required per m3 salt hydrate: 269 kg/m3
Heat required for evaporation of 269 kgs of water is 0, 61 GJ.
Scientific literature typically 'solves' this issue by referring to an additional ground heat source that should provide low grade, affordable heat for evaporating the water. This solution may be sufficient, but adds substantial costs to the CAPEX and OPEX of your thermal storage system. Also, if one already has to invest in such a ground source that provides up to half of the power to be extracted from the salt hydrates, it could end up economically more sensible to double the size of the ground source and invest your capital in a regular electric heat pump rather than in the logistics plus technology plus salt hydrates required for a salt hydrates system.
Ideally, one would apply the salt hydrate system for applications that inherently provide a source of humid air, for example by heating swimming pools and using their exhaust ventilation air to extract heat from your salt hydrates. However, even in these preferable applications, it may very well be that it is economically more sensible to extract the condensation heat from the exhaust ventilation air using air-source heat pumps instead.

[mikeskutches]

Thank you, Dave.
You're a good man, doing good for the world.
Much appreciated.

[TrollFaceTheMan]

Funny thing is I was just having a conversation with a fried a few weeks back saying there should be a system exactly like this for pretty much any data center they can do so with.

Cool to see it happening.

[daviddunmore]

back in the early eighties, I was working in New York, and the insurance company I worked for use the hot water from the Water cooled IBM mainframe to heat the building.

[sokolmihajlovic]

Ty, good video.
About 50% of energy use in a country (here in Germany), is for heating. Just 20 to 25% is electricity.
So using waste heat, not just from data centers, makes a lot sense.
It is shared economy.
My point is here, key in this transition is, that every home and business has a well isolated, sizeable warm water storage. Kind of a energy battery.
The next step to connect businesses and private homes is then not that difficult anymore.
Homes use hot water all year long for washing and showers. In Winter they need more heat though, in summer they have to much of it. A heat pump can bridge that, by cooling in summer and (if necessary) heating up in winter.
A network (grid) for sharing hot water, means heat.
F.e. cooling facilities, ice cream producers, fish processors and such, have lots of waste heat to.
My guess is, there is so much waste heat outthere that about 60%+ of all heat needs of people and businesses can be met by sharing heat, instead of burning fossil fuels/gas.

[larrybolhuis]

The Office Furniture company SteelCase in Grand Rapids, MI, USA buried massive water tanks under the front lawn of their headquarters building way back in the 1980s. This was done specifically to store heat from the computers as well as the building, so that it could be used overnight to keep the building warm. During warmer months when more heat than needed is generated, it is cooled at night when the outdoor air is cooler, and power is cheaper.

As mentioned in the video, and by others posting here, the concept isn't new it's just that we continue to stupidly apply the same solution to computer cooling 'because we've always done it that way.' (Adm Grace Hopper would be screaming at this insanity!)

[Daniel-qrsx]

This concept is in use in Sweden Stockholm! And it pays of in an insane amount of time.

[messman]

UMass Amherst used to incinerate its trash for power, and then used the waste heat to provide heating for buildings and hot water.

I don't know about old towns and cities, but new ones could be built to utilize this approach, especially for things like waste management.

The idea of storing that waste heat is fascinating, and I would like to read more about it.

[Flobyby]

Living in a european city with mild winter, I wonder if such heat storage (salt / PCM) could be used as a winter/summer cycle via a heat pump : providing AC in the summer and heating in the winter.