
Amazon’s Seattle campus is using a data center next door as a furnace - ehllo
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/11/22/16684102/amazon-data-center-district-heating
======
semi-extrinsic
Waste heat usage has been a thing since around the time we invented the steam
engine.

Regenerative heating was in fact key to the first industrial revolution, it
was the only way to make blast furnaces with high enough temperature and
power.

It's only recently that datacenter power usage (and thus waste heat) has
become large enough for waste heat usage to be interesting.

~~~
hkmurakami
I'm pretty sure my college used the heat product from its cogeneration plant
on campus to heat our buildings and dorms. Actually, that was probably already
a thing when Bezos was a student there.

~~~
IgorPartola
A lot of colleges use cogeneration plants. Almost nobody else does. From what
I understand, it nearly doubles the total efficiency of burning coal, though
the output is not more electricity but heat. The physics is pretty simple as
explained by the Carnot cycle [1]:

Efficiency <= 1 - Tc / Th, where Tc is the cold exhaust temperature and Th is
the hot temperature. This is of course a theoretical ideal engine.

The issue is that for something like a coal or oil or gas plant, Tc is still
damn hot. Something like 900 degrees F is common. It's too low to use for a
second cycle of electricity usage, but it's still plenty hot to heat your
living room.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_efficiency#Carnot_effi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_efficiency#Carnot_efficiency)

~~~
khuey
A good portion of Manhattan has a steam system that's partially fed by
cogeneration.

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nicpottier
I have a winter cabin up in the mountains near Seattle, which so happens to
have some of the cheapest electricity in the world. (there are quite a few
cryptocurrency mines nearby) Though we generally heat the place using a
modern, efficient wood stove, I've half seriously been pondering buying a few
graphics cards and doing some Ethereum mining to heat the basement. If I
wasn't a bit scared about it setting the place on fire I'd probably do it, but
pretty sure I'd end up heating the place for free after a season.

~~~
lexicality
Have you ever considered a Rocket Mass Heater?
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_mass_heater](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_mass_heater))
I've been fascinated by them since I found out about the concept but renting
inside a city has never given me the chance to try one out.

~~~
nicpottier
These are definitely interesting, kind of have to build your house around one
though.

We currently use a wood stove that uses a catalytic combuster, so actually
reburns the smoke for even more heat. Silly efficiency and almost no
particulate matter so passes even the most stringent environmental laws. Its
actually one the greenest ways to heat a place like ours. (it only heats the
main living area though, we use small space heaters for bedrooms downstairs)

~~~
lostlogin
A wetback powering distant radiators is what I want to do. It’s just that the
radiators look ugly and aren’t easily removed in summer.

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whatusername
IBM/GIB-Services used a DC to heat a municipal swimming pool in 2008:
[http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/04/02/data-...](http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/04/02/data-
center-used-to-heat-swimming-pool)

------
hdkrgr
Technical University Munich has been doing this since at least 2011 to heat
half of their campus:
[https://www.lrz.de/services/compute/supermuc/systemdescripti...](https://www.lrz.de/services/compute/supermuc/systemdescription/)
(see section on warm water cooling)

------
lclarkmichalek
FB is doing something similar in Denmark, heating 6900 homes:
[http://www.decentralized-
energy.com/articles/2017/09/faceboo...](http://www.decentralized-
energy.com/articles/2017/09/facebook-data-center-to-heat-danish-city.html)

------
bartkappenburg
See Nerdalize[0]

From their site: Heat your home with cloud servers!

The CloudBox contains powerful servers, used by companies and researchers for
their computations. The produced heat is used to heat up the water in your
home. You get free hot water and save on your gas bill. And you contribute to
an enormous reduction of CO2 emissions!

I think that’s a really nice concept!

[0] [https://www.nerdalize.com/heating/](https://www.nerdalize.com/heating/)

~~~
pentae
Imagine how great it would be if we lived in a society where our homes were
easily hooked up with internet fast enough to run servers from home? Must be
nice.

~~~
jjeaff
How fast would it need to be? Would a Google fiber style 1Gb up and down
connection be plenty for a single rack of servers?

~~~
zitterbewegung
If it was a workload like bitcoin it would not need a fast connection at all.
You could ship it with a copy of the Blockchain and it would download the
delta after you turn it on.

------
scosman
Dev 1: it's kinda cold in the office, should we call ops?

Dev 2: naaa, just spin up a cluster if c5.18xls

~~~
tdeck
Reminds me of this old Daily WTF: [http://thedailywtf.com/articles/Just-a-
WarmUp](http://thedailywtf.com/articles/Just-a-WarmUp)

~~~
eloff
Thanks for sharing, that was good for a laugh.

------
spatten
Telus, the big phone company and ISP in British Columbia, does this in
downtown Vancouver[1].

IIRC, I first heard about this in Work Like Nature[2][3]

[1]:
[http://www.vancouversun.com/g00/technology/telus+million+dev...](http://www.vancouversun.com/g00/technology/telus+million+development+will+waste+heat+from+nearby+data+centre/8028880/story.html?i10c.encReferrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNhLw%3D%3D)

[2]: [https://leanpub.com/worklikenature](https://leanpub.com/worklikenature)

[3]: I have a double conflict of interest here. The author is my wife, and
Leanpub is my startup.

------
mschuster91
Wonder if it's feasible to sell Bitcoin mining rigs doubling as a heat
generator... for what its worth they could pay themselves.

~~~
psyc
I have a friend who is heating his home exclusively with mining rigs this
winter. I'm not sure what he plans to do next summer.

~~~
jameskegel
I'm doing this right now; in the summer I just run the AC and the rigs still
outcompete my power bill by about 2x

~~~
psyc
That's great to know! I wasn't sure how the AC cost would work out.

~~~
jameskegel
I live in Memphis, TN. We enjoy cheap power at a rate of .0909USD per kWh

------
IgorPartola
I actually would love to heat my basement area with a mining rig. Last time I
mined stuff was before ASICs for BitCoin were a thing. Is it possible to GPU
mine stuff nowadays in a way that's even remotely profitable, when you count
the savings on heat? My current electric rate is just under $0.095.

------
sathackr
Relevant: Bitcoin Boiler

[http://en.hotmine.io](http://en.hotmine.io)

------
cprecioso
Just went a few days ago to the TU Delft incubator and they showed us the
whole building gets hot water with a bunch of servers doing intense
calculations. The startup that places these servers has really low prices for
cloud computing because of this.

------
candiodari
Using things that need cooling, datacenters, factories, mines, ... has a very
long history.

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sparcpile
A dot-com back in the last 90s that a friend of mine ran with a Sun E10K
proposed selling the hot air to a pizza restaurant that was next door.

The restaurant ended up declining because air was too dirty and could not be
for cooking.

------
msl09
Haha, I remembered that people have proposed that solution many times and I
was about to ask what changed before reading the comments.

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moonbug22
CHP was invented about an hour after the steam engine. FFS.

------
producernyc
Dealing with waste has been an issue we've been dealing with since the dawn of
the industrial revolution.

