In England, a town uses overheated computers to heat swimming pools

Opening a large white box, Mark Bjornsgaard shows dozens of computing units whose heat is used to heat the water in the Exmouth municipal swimming pool, in the southwest of England, reducing their energy costs and carbon footprint.

Bjornsgaard is the president of Deep Green, a data center-owning company that proposed implementing this innovative solution. to cool down your numerous computerswhile benefiting the sports center of the small town.

“It is a symbiotic relationship. We cool our computers for free (…) the pool does us a great favor and we do it to them”, he adds.

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“Normal data centers just dump that heat. They use a huge amount of water to evaporate it”, he explains, specifying that 99% of this heat is later expelled into the atmosphere.

But at the Exmouth Sports Center, an innovative installation avoids that waste.

Inside a white box the size of a dishwasher, the computing units are submerged in a mineral oil that captures their heat. This oil then flows to another device where it meets, without mixing, with the cold water of the 25-meter-long pool.

This allows it to be heated to 29º C around 65% of the timereducing the use of the gas boiler.

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Deep Green, whose business is renting powerful computers capable of hosting artificial intelligence systems, pays its own energy bill and transfers the heat to the sports center for freebut saves on refrigeration.

According to Bjornsgaard, about half the cost of running a data center goes into cooling the computers.

“We do not have those costs. So from an environmental and sustainable point of view, it’s a very positive thing.“, it states.

“Considerable savings”

For Peter Gilpin, manager of the sports center, the implementation of this technology was “very timely”, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 sent energy prices skyrocketing.

Water and power bills account for about a third of the total costs of running the sports complex, and gas to heat the pool had tripled to nearly £80,000 ($102,000) a year before the data center was installed in March.

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“We got hit pretty hard by rising gas prices this winter, but hopefully next winter a big chunk of our heating costs will come from Deep Green technology.“, it states.

Although it is too early to judge the long-term results, they are already seeing “reductions in gas consumption” and a “considerable savings”, he assures.

But “not only did we reduce our spending on energy and our gas consumption, which was the main benefit sought, but we also we also reduce our carbon footprint”, he emphasizes.

Gilpin claims to be “proud” that their center is the first to implement Deep Green technology and are now considering installing it at two other pools they manage.

But soon there could be many more.

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Bjornsgaard claims to have seen the “demand to shoot“, with thousands of possible locations across Europe who want to implement this device, especially swimming pools and municipal heating systems.

At the same time, more and more companies are looking to use Deep Green computers because they are “environmentally friendly” and “much cheaper than your usual cloud service provider“, it states.

“But we also provide a social benefit, right? We’re heating a pool and helping keep pools open”, he concludes.

Source: Elcomercio

Callum

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