I feel like dumping “waste” heat is the same as burning off “waste” gas from pumping oil.
It’s not really just a waste byproduct, there just isn’t a profitable way to utilize it. That heat could be used, but we just dump it into the ocean or the atmosphere because it’s cheaper than building municipal heating or recycling it for industrial uses.
I heard about that! Heat from data centers is harder, unfortunately, because the amount of waste heat generated by a nuclear reactor is far higher than the amount generated by a data center. With smaller quantities of heat come greater costs to recuperate it, at least until they link all the waste-heat sources up into a single network that can collect from multiple data centers.
China is moving fast, though. I bet we’ll see some kind of project like this before the bubble pops in the US.
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I feel like dumping “waste” heat is the same as burning off “waste” gas from pumping oil.
It’s not really just a waste byproduct, there just isn’t a profitable way to utilize it. That heat could be used, but we just dump it into the ocean or the atmosphere because it’s cheaper than building municipal heating or recycling it for industrial uses.
China’s already doing this with nuclear, so there’s a good chance they might do this with data centers too. https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/chinas-first-commercial-nuclear-district-heating-scheme-expands
I heard about that! Heat from data centers is harder, unfortunately, because the amount of waste heat generated by a nuclear reactor is far higher than the amount generated by a data center. With smaller quantities of heat come greater costs to recuperate it, at least until they link all the waste-heat sources up into a single network that can collect from multiple data centers.
China is moving fast, though. I bet we’ll see some kind of project like this before the bubble pops in the US.
indeed