Amazon to Use Server Farm Waste Heat for Office Heating

Computer Data Center Server Farm Waste Heat

This morning in my ASHRAE newsletter, I saw an interesting story about a cool thing Amazon.com is planning to do with heat. Amazon, in case you didn’t know, is a heavy user of computers. Not only do their run their online store but they also have a popular cloud computing service. Computers turn electricity into kitten videos, celebrity tweets, and waste heat. And that last one is huge.

This morning in my ASHRAE newsletter, I saw an interesting story about a cool thing Amazon.com is planning to do with heat. Amazon, in case you didn’t know, is a heavy user of computers. Not only do their run their online store but they also have a popular cloud computing service. Computers turn electricity into kitten videos, celebrity tweets, and waste heat. And that last one is huge.

A typical server uses about 350 watts of power and produces about 1200 BTU/hr of waste heat. (These numbers are from a paper written in 2011, but more about that later.) With 50 servers, you could get as much heat as a 60,000 BTU/hr furnace, but most of the time that heat is not only not used, the owner of the server farm pays to have it removed from the server room with the use of air conditioning.

Amazon is building a new office center in Seattle, and they’re planning to heat it with waste heat from a nearby server farm. It’s going through the approval process with the local government now, but this would turn around the energy flows and make use of the heat given off instead of using more energy to get rid of it.

It’s not a new idea. As long as people have been going into server rooms and feeling the heat, they’ve been talking about what a great idea it would be if you could use that heat. It’s fairly low grade heat, though, so it wouldn’t be ideal for generating electricity but is just right for heating buildings…if you can get the heat to where it needs to be. The Amazon plans aren’t out yet, at least not in what I’ve seen, but they’re going to capture the heat in water to move to their office building.

A few years ago, Microsoft published a paper called The Data Furnace: Heating Up with Cloud Computing, which looked at the possibility of heating homes with servers. They found that it would take 37 to 114 of those 350 W servers to provide all the heat for homes in five different climates. The owner of the data furnace would net about $300 in savings for each server.

It’s an interesting idea, but somehow I just don’t see that one taking root. What Amazon is doing, though, should represent a new trend. And Seattle is the ideal place to do it because they don’t have extremely low temperatures but do need a lot of heat throughout the year. I recall having the heat on and wearing my wool sweater even in July one year when I lived there.

Another way to do this is with variable refrigerant flow (VRF) heat pumps. These are the big brothers to mini-splits and allow you to do simultaneous heating and cooling, bypassing the outdoor unit of the heat pump altogether. The refrigerant picks up heat in a room that needs to be cooled and sends it to another room that needs to be heated.

Using waste heat from computers reminds me of Martin Holladay’s April Fool’s Day article a few years ago: Researchers Predict U.S. Furnace Industry Is Doomed. In it he wrote that plasma TVs would soon be labeled with their heat output in BTU/hr.

What do you think? Where is all this heading?

 

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Photo of data center by Henrik Bennetsen from flickr.com, used under a Creative Commons license.

 

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This Post Has 3 Comments

  1. When I was in high school and
    When I was in high school and college in the late 60’s and early 70’s, I had a side job as a draftsman for Electrical Testing Laboratories (now ETL). I always remember my first tour of the building with Frank Moses, their chief engineer. Among the highlights was a room of air conditioners undergoing performance tests. Frank pointed out that they always tried to stage tests that required either heat or heat removal to use the waste heat from another test. As an aside, I also remember a Porsche on a test rack to test seat belt mounting points–a destructive test, as there was less Porsche each time I saw it.

  2. I loved your droll comment
    I loved your droll comment about electricity being turned into kitten videos and celebrity tweets… and waste heat.  
    you are funny.

  3. my building had waste heat
    my building had waste heat recovery from the data center but the intensity is so low that it’s not of much value. By the time it arrives at the building there is not much intensity left to drive energy transfer. our engineer said it would be useful to preheat water but that was about it.

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