A dual use for datacenters?
Jesse Robbins has an interesting post on O’Reilly Radar about how IBM is building a new datacenter in Zurich that will use its excess heat to warm a public swimming pool for local residents. He references an article on GreenerComputing.com, which notes that “the Zurich data center will be completed later this year, and will generate 2,800 megawatts of excess heat each year.” According to Steve Sams of IBM, reclaiming the waste heat from the data center “will save about 130 tons of CO2 emissions.”
I often wonder why more efforts like this aren’t underway, especially when I’m sitting here in the office. Like just about any office today, we have stacks of servers and workstations generating all kinds of excess heat, and meanwhile the air conditioning is working overtime to keep the space cool (too cool, in my opinion—I keep my jacket on almost all day). Aside from the environmental impacts of all this energy use, I’m sure our electricity bills are higher than our CFO would prefer.
Google is another company that seems to be working towards environmentally friendly solutions—their solar panel project is a great example of one such effort—but I’m curious if these are isolated examples or part of a larger trend. I certainly hope it’s the latter.
