2023-06-23 09:45:02
When the heat of the computers benefits the bathers: in a leisure center of Exmouth, in the south-west of England, the swimming pool is heated thanks to a small data center, an innovation which reduces its energy bill.
An installation recovers the heat generated by a row of computers, and makes it possible to heat water to a temperature of 29°C 65% of the time, thus reducing the need for gas boilers.
Deep Green, the British company leading the project, does not charge for heat and covers its own electricity costs, but charges customers for the use of its computers, which are used in areas such as machine learning or artificial intelligence.
“It’s a symbiotic relationship,” says company CEO Mark Bjornsgaard. “Our computers are cooled for free, the swimming pool does us a favor as much as we do it a favor by giving it this heat,” he told AFP at the Exmouth leisure center.
Lifting the lid of a white box the size of a dishwasher, he reveals computer boards that are bathed in mineral oil that recovers heat. The oil then heats the water through an exchanger.
“Traditional data centers just evacuate this heat. They use an enormous quantity of water to dissipate the heat by evaporation,” he explains, specifying that 99% of this heat is lost in the atmosphere.
According to the entrepreneur, about half of the cost of operating a data center is spent on cooling the computers.
“We don’t have those costs. And from an environmental point of view, it’s a very good thing,” he boasts.
“Significant savings”
According to Peter Gilpin, CEO of leisure center operator LED Community Leisure, the deployment of this technology came at the right time after the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year, which led to a spike in the price of electricity. energy.
Those expenses usually make up, he says, about one-third of the recreation center’s total operating costs. The swimming pool’s annual gas bill had more than tripled to almost £80,000 (93,000 euros) before the data center was installed in March.
“We were hit hard by this increase in the price of gas during the winter, but we hope that next winter, a very large part of our heating costs will come from the use of this technology”, declared Peter Gilpin .
If it is still too early to judge the results over a long period, he already observes “a reduction in (their) gas consumption” and “significant savings” even in the context of the reduction in energy prices these last months.
“Not only does this reduce our energy costs and our gas consumption, which was the primary virtue, but we reduce our carbon footprint,” he points out.
The leisure center teams are now looking to install this technology in two other swimming pools they operate.
But they may have competition.
According to the CEO of the company, “the demand has exploded”, thousands of potential sites want to use their technology throughout Europe, in particular swimming pools and heating installations.
At the same time, more companies are looking to use Deep Green’s computers because they are “green” and “much cheaper” than their usual vendors, says Bjornsgaard. “But we have a social utility, don’t we?”
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