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Free Data-Center Heat Is Allegedly Saving a Struggling Public Pool $24K a Year (arstechnica.com) 34

Posted by BeauHD from the dual-purpose dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A public pool in the UK is expected to save [about $24,000] and cut carbon emissions by 25.8 tons annually by warming a 25-meter children's pool with waste heat from a data center from startup Deep Green. UK-based Deep Green is a newcomer in the data-center heat game and is making its entrance notable by putting a monetary figure on potential savings, which are fueled by the heat's low, low rate of free. Deep Green's paying customers are machine-learning and AI firms seeking computing resources. As reported by Datacenter Dynamics on Tuesday, clients can leverage Deep Green's 28 kW system with high-performance computing (HPC) capabilities. The HPC cluster at the Exmouth Leisure Centre swimming pool has 12 four-CPU cards and could eventually be used for cloud services and video rendering, Deep Green CEO Mark Bjornsgaard told the publication. According to the BBC , the server is about the size of a washing machine.

The computers are submerged in mineral oil that captures heat that gets transferred into pool water with a heat exchanger. The pool still has a gas boiler to boost the water's temperature if required. Deep Green claims it's transferring about 96 percent of the energy used by its computers and reducing a pool's gas heat usage by 62 percent. Deep Green is paying the Exmouth Leisure Centre for all the electricity its data center uses, as well as any setup costs, and the Exmouth Leisure Centre gets the heat for free.

Deep Green CTO Mat Craggs told Datacenter Dynamics: "Our expected heat transfer from the kit is 139,284 kWh a year, equivalent to 62 percent of the pool's heat needs." He noted that adding more servers to the tub could extend the figure to 70 or 80 percent. Deep Green's data center can heat the Exmouth Leisure Centre's 25 meter pool to 86 degrees Fahrenheit for about 60 percent of the time, BBC reported. The startup has plans to set up data centers in seven more UK locations and has a 2023 target of 20 locations.
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Free Data-Center Heat Is Allegedly Saving a Struggling Public Pool $24K a Year More

Free Data-Center Heat Is Allegedly Saving a Struggling Public Pool $24K a Year

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  • "...25 meter pool to 86 degrees Fahrenheit..." - Metric or imperial, which is it to be? Trying to alienate ALL your readers?
    • Usually smaller pools in the US are in yards. An olympic pool is something like 50m x 25yd. If you do laps crossways its 50yd laps. If you do them lengthwise its 100m laps. The smaller pools are 25yds in length. Makes swimming for exercise interesting to say the least. Same for meets. Buy olympic sized pools were usually set around 72F so you dont get too heated competing.

    • It's the UK, they may laugh at Americans for not being metric but they've got an even crazier mish-mash of measurements. Just be glad they didn't measure the swimming pool's capacity in kilderkins.

      • Well, I'm sticking with cubits & palms until they can settle on something more consistent.

      • No country that uses the stone as a valid weight has room to complain about other countries units.

        At least no one is doing density in stones per cubic smoot.

    • Re:Make your mind up (Score:4, Informative)

      by Alain Williams ( 2972 ) <addw@phcomp.co.uk> on Friday March 17, 2023 @08:27PM (#63379509) Homepage

      In the UK most public pools are 25m long as that is the length of a standard Olympic pool. If you look at the BBC article that is linked you will see that the temperature is quoted as 30 Centigrade, as are most temperatures in the UK these days. It is arstechnica that has come up with Farenheit - presumably as readers is the USA do not really understand Centigrade.

    • > Metric or imperial, which is it to be? Trying to alienate ALL your readers?

      Posiblemente, no obstante, para esta muy beneficial to be at least bilingual.

  • We've had both the technology and the incentive to do this for at least 30 years, but today it's making news like it's some brilliant revelation.

  • Wrong (Score:1)

    by DrXym ( 126579 )

    What is actually happening is a data centre is greenwashing it's grotesque energy consumption by pretending it's doing a solid by piping that heat to some pool nearby.

    • Lol love it

    • I say, terrible what they're doing with those motorized carriages nowadays, wot? Should go back to the good old horse and buggy I say! All this advantage they're blithering on about. Who NEEDS to travel easily anyway? Ugh technology.

      Seriously though, there's going to be one in every conversation. No matter the idea or improvement, it's not 100% perfect so why bother?
      It's called progress, and it's part of what keeps you alive.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DrXym ( 126579 )

        No, this isn't progress, this is a garbage idea masquerading as a green endeavour. The proper solution is to reduce the amount of waste energy being produced in the first place. Not just in this one server room, but all of them - force them to take the problem seriously through regulation to reduce their energy consumption and their heat output.

  • The real story (Score:3)

    by Powercntrl ( 458442 ) on Friday March 17, 2023 @07:31PM (#63379443) Homepage

    Heating a swimming pool without waste heat or solar is grotesquely wasteful.
     

    • But retrofitting is expensive and waste heat is not always close by. Solar doesn't work everywhere... although replacing the gas boiler with a heat pump should be a no brainer in the UK.

  • Worth it? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) *

    Heating such a pool costs between £1000 and £2000 per day, so this covers about 3 weeks.

    • There's absolutely no way you'd spend that much per day. That's more like a monthly bill. They're expecting to save 20K which is 62% of their annual costs - that puts their annual costs around 32K or 2600 per month, which still seems like a lot (speaking as a former pool owner). I guess energy prices have really shot up lately.

      • We're talking about Olympic pools here, usually couple with one on 2 kiddie pools, heated up to a much higher temperature, not to mention the baby-pools.

        For the Olympic pool, I asked ChatGPT:

        The volume of an Olympic-sized swimming pool is around 2,500,000 liters (660,430 gallons) of water. The cost to heat such a large pool will depend on several factors, such as the location, climate, and heating system used.

        According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the average cost to heat a 1,000-gallon pool from 78F t

        • We're talking about Olympic pools here

          No we're not. We're talking about a 25m pool sometimes called a short course pool. It's half as long as an olympic pool, 2-3 lanes narrower, and usally not as deep either. They typically range from 600,000L to 1,000,000L to

          heated up to a much higher temperature

          No they aren't. They are maybe 1 or 2 degrees warmer.

          Assuming a

          So far you've incorrectly assumed the size of the pool, the temperature of the pool, and now you're making assumptions about the temperature rise required by the pool owner. Don't do that. Stop pretending you know more about the owner o

        • You think ChatGPT knows more about the heating costs of this particular pool than its actual owners? Why? How? All your figures are pure fiction. You know nothing about operating a pool, or the physics of heat loss (which is a function of surface area, not volume).

          My 25,000 gallon indoor pool cost $5-10 a day to heat, and I kept it warmer than most public pools during swim season at 87-90 degrees. Off-season, I kept it at 80 and covered when not in use to minimize heat loss while retaining ability to heat i

  • What happens if they ever have a bunch of warm days? Does the server keep heating up the water anyway to hottub temperatures?

    Ok Ok, I guess it's in England so maybe a long run of sunny warm weather isn't super likely but 62% is a high fraction so aren't there a fair number of days where they might exceed 100%?

  • Nuclear Lake (Score:5, Informative)

    by cstacy ( 534252 ) on Friday March 17, 2023 @09:22PM (#63379583)

    There's a huge (13,000 acre, 17 mile long) lake here in the country - a recreational lake and also a residential lake. It was created and serves as the cooling water for the adjacent nuclear power plant. A relative has a lake home there and when we go swimming in the early winter months, it's nice and warm.

    It's also fine in the summer months. The reactor adds about 7.6C (14 F) degrees to the lake's temperature on the hot side. (The lake is divided into the cold intake side, where the public beaches are; the private residential side is the discharge side. Underground channels eventually recirculate water back to the cold side.

    The plant currently has two reactors online giving about 15,371 GWh annually.

    The lake was created expressly for the nuclear plant by damming a river. So they also stuck a 1 MW hydroelectric station on it.

    The lake started construction in 1968, they started building the reactor in 1971, the lake was filled (two years earlier than anticipated, due to a hurricane) in 1972, and the reactors came online in 1978.

    This is Lake Anna in Virginia.

  • The Blessed Waters (Score:5, Funny)

    by cstacy ( 534252 ) on Friday March 17, 2023 @09:24PM (#63379589)

    Legend says that if you bathe in the waters of the data centers, your children will be smarter, or at least you'll think of more things to order from Amazon.

    This is The Way.
    So say we all.

  • If a general purpose digital computer can replace a resistive heating element, I am all for it.

    A resistive heating element is a lot cheaper and less resource intensive to build than an oil cooled server, but I guess if youâ(TM)re going to build that computer anywaysâ¦

  • Around here, people strongly object to data centers due to the noise pollution they create. This is despite the fact that we have jet aircraft flying overhead 24 hours a day.
  • I'm sick of this getting parroted in every article about it. What they are doing is getting cheap edge node locations at sites that already have high capacity electricity supplies i.e. public swimming pools. They've only done one, and they are a 7 person company. Good luck running this with one ops person and one tech BTW and achieving 5 9s of uptime! https://deepgreen.energy/heat [deepgreen.energy] Simple maths says that if it's an Olympic pool with 2500000 liters of water you'd need around 3MW/h to raise the temp by 1 d

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