My teenage son regularly complains about his room being too warm, even during winter. While the rest of the house is at a comfortable temperature, the video game PC he plays emits a significant amount of heat.

A high-spec computer like his typically has a power of more than 800 watts. That's enough to boil one liter of water from room temperature in less than eight minutes. So at scale, computer data processing centers are a massive, and predominantly untapped, source of heat or thermal energy.

A new project run by UK tech firm Deep Green is recapturing some of this heat and using it to warm swimming pools. In March 2023, the company connected Exmouth Leisure Center's 25-meter pool in Devon to an onsite data center, slashing their heating bill by 60%.

Now, that pilot is scaling up and 150 public swimming pools could soon be recycling excess heat and cutting their energy bills at the same time.

The power of data

The potential to improve energy efficiency is huge. Just like my son's computer, each data center produces excess heat from huge servers that work around the clock. Depending on their size, data center buildings contain thousands, and sometimes millions of computer servers arranged in rows of special IT racks.

Just as individual computers need high-speed fans and heat sinks on components such as microprocessors, data centers rely on cooling towers to dissipate excess heat to the surrounding environment. That cooling accounts for about 50% of total electricity consumption in data centers.

There were approximately 10,978 data centers worldwide in 2023. With increasing online connectivity, expansion of AI applications and cloud services, many more data centers will be needed in the future.

In 2022, global data center electricity consumption was between 240–340 TWh, according to the International Energy Agency. This is vast given that the UK's total annual energy consumption was about 275 TWh in the same year. In the Republic of Ireland, for example, data centers consumed 20% of the total electricity consumption in 2022.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.