Deep Green, a data centre heat recapturing company, has used the heat generated by a data centre used to heat a Devon public swimming pool.
The computers inside the white box are surrounded by oil to capture the heat - enough to heat the pool to about 30C 60% of the time, saving Exmouth Leisure Centre thousands of pounds. The energy is provided to the council-run centre free of charge and the leisure centre's electricity costs for running the "digital boiler” will also be refunded.
"The partnership has really helped us reduce the costs of what has been astronomical over the last 12 months - our energy prices and gas prices have gone through the roof,” said Sean Day, who runs the leisure centre.
According to the company the data centre has to be at the heart of communities, contributing too, rather than detracting from local communities. This can be achieved through an integrated planning process, using the heat for district heating, supporting local community services like swimming pools or even as part of new residential and commercial developments.
UK Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, recently highlighted the £800 million investment in supercomputing, this can be achieve in a sustainable manner, to support NetZero 2030 as an integrated Metropolitan Edge data centre within every community. Keysource and Deep Green are working together to scale this approach across the UK.
The project was able to find the ‘load’ that marries up with the Direct Liquid Cooling compute approach in a footprint that can be sustainable and secure whilst ensuring the IT hardware has valid ‘warranty’ in direct liquid cooling / immersed environment.
Moving forward this approach also addresses the Grid limitations and energy requirements that are significantly limiting opportunities to develop new data-centre capacity and creating a negative image of the data centre industry which is manifesting itself in moratoriums on new project development.
This approach uses small pockets of 'spare' and already allocated grid capacity to deliver edge and HPC capabilities within the fabric of society. The energy recapture model saves pools at least 63% on their energy requirements to heat the pool.
It uses the energy efficiency benefits of immersion and direct liquid cooling in combination with heat re-use to deliver a PUE of 1.005 or lower and runs on 100% renewable energy.
