Editor’s note: This story was first published by Zoe Kleinman, BBC News. You can view it in its original format by clicking here.
Deep Green, which provides computing power to clients for machine learning and artificial intelligence, is now providing heat to public swimming pools in England. This concept was created over five years ago.
Deep Green’s “digital heater” is a computer that is enclosed in mineral oil. To heat water in a swimming-pool, the hot oil is pumped through a heat exchanger. It heats the water to 30° Celsius (86° Fahrenheit).
“Data centers have a big problem with heat,” Mark Bjornsgaard of Deep Green, the founder. The heat is a major expense for data centers. We’ve taken very little of a data centre and used it to recycle the heat in a helpful and useful way.
BBC News reported last summer that 65 swimming pools had closed since 2019 due to rising energy prices. Sean Day, who is responsible for Exmouth Leisure Center, Exmouth, United Kingdom’s, was inspired by Deep Green’s unique idea. He jumped at the chance to join.
Day stated that “our energy and gas prices have shot through the roof” and that he had expected the leisure center’s energy bills would rise by 100,000 pounds. BBC News interviewed Day. “But this partnership really helped us reduce costs heating our swimming pool and has allowed us to look at other ways the center could save money span>
Other uses of data centers include powering thousands of homes in cities like Denmark and Sweden. If they are managed properly, large data centers require huge amounts of cooling water. Some are even built underwater.
