Data Center Waste: Turning Heat Into Productive Use
David Gardiner and Associates (DGA) produced this resource to examine the merits and potential applications of data center heat reuse. Data centers produce large amounts of heat and must use air conditioning to cool it — otherwise, their servers could overheat and fail. Roughly 40% of data center electricity use is devoted to cooling, according to the Department of Energy. But there are many viable ways to reuse that waste heat.
The study looks at four use cases for waste heat from liquid cooled data centers.
- Pharmaceutical & dedicine manufacturing
- Food & beverage
- Commercial process cooling & refrigeration
- General hot water pre-hearing
Each application involves during that waste into a commercial product and presents an opportunity to lower costs and carbon emissions for both data centers and end-users.
Download the form to the view the report. This study was commissioned by Intel.
For additional information on data center heat reuse, check out this guide from Open Compute Project: “Data Centers Heat Reuse 101.” It answers several foundational questions, including when and why heat reuse is beneficial; what makes a good heat host; and who gets the CO2 emissions reduction from heat reuse.
