www.Tobold.com
Tobold@GMail.com
A blog with my thoughts regarding games I am playing and other stuff in life. Please read my Terms of Service
RSS Feed
Wednesday, April 22, 2026
Data centers and district heating
The AI boom has led to the construction of data centers that can have 1 GW or more of capacity. Which means that it takes 1 GWh of energy to run them for 1 hour, or 8760 GWh per year. At an electricty cost of let‘s say $100 per MWh, this costs 876 million dollars. And thermodynamically speaking, all the data center does is transform high value electric energy into low value low temperature heat, an energy that is currently just wasted.
It doesn‘t have to be that way. Many European countries have for decades been working on district heating, that is systems that use waste heat from incinerators to heat water, to be sent by pipe into every household for heating. A million inhabitants in a central European city need about 2 GW of heat in winter. If that heat could be provided by two data centers, the overall CO2 emissions for heating would be a lot lower.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:09 PM Permanent Link
