Since 2020, Meta’s hyperscale data center — spanning 50,000 square meters on an industrial estate on the edge of the city — has been pushing warm air generated by its servers into the district heating network under Odense. That heat is then dispersed through 100,000 households hooked up to the system, with Meta providing enough heat to cover roughly 11,000.
Wish this kind of joined up thinking happened in places other than the Nordics.
Data centres and industry exist and dump heat all over the world. Putting it to use is a no brainer.
I think the Nordics is probably the only place capable of utilizing this system in the first place. It looks like they have a utility system that already centralizes heating for their communities. They basically have a hot water line that circulates through radiators located in all the buildings in the community. Facebook was able to hook their heat exchange to this system, so they didn’t have to build any real infrastructure.
I’m not really sure how efficient this solution is, it really depends if their centralized system is a closed or open system. The water Facebook is pumping out is only 80 degrees, and has to be heated up to 170 by the utility company for service.
The problem is that while these servers produce a large volume of heated air, the intensity of that heat is very low, making it hard to exploit or preserve for transfer.