A Meta data center in Odense, Denmark, is using the heat released by servers to warm thousands of homes in the city. Instead of wasting the thermal energy generated by the equipment, the facility transfers it to the local district heating network, where heat pumps raise the water temperature to 70 to 75 degrees Celsius.
Almost all electricity consumed by a data center ends up converted into heat, which makes these infrastructures particularly efficient sources of thermal energy when integrated into district heating systems. The Odense system enables a heat supply on a scale never before seen from heat pumps and heat capture systems.
Denmark has larger plans to expand this solution, indicating that the country sees the waste heat from data centers as a significant opportunity for the energy transition and for reducing carbon emissions associated with residential heating.
An estimate published in the journal Sustainable Cities and Society is mentioned in the article as a reference for the data on the thermal efficiency of data centers, although the citation appears incomplete in the text.
