Sustainable Biz Magazine A4 March 2023 - Flipbook - Page 37
Data centre used to heat
public swimming pool
A
data centre no bigger
than a washing machine
is heating a Devon public
swimming pool.
The computers are surrounded by oil
which enables them to capture the
heat which can get the pool to around
30C approximately 60% of the time,
saving Exmouth Leisure Centre
thousands of pounds.
The data centre is provided to the
council-run centre free of charge and
the start-up Deep Green charges
clients to use its computing power
for artificial intelligence and machine
learning.
Founder Mark Bjornsgaard said the
company would also refund the
leisure centre's electricity costs for
running the "digital boiler" - and
seven other England pools had signed
up to the scheme.
"The partnership has really
helped us reduce the costs of
what has been astronomical
over the last 12 months our energy prices and gas
prices have gone through
the roof"
The concept, developed over five
years sees the hot oil pumped into a
heat exchanger to warm the water in
the pool.
Sean Day, who runs the leisure centre,
said: "The partnership has really
helped us reduce the costs of what
has been astronomical over the last
12 months - our energy prices and gas
prices have gone through the roof."
"Looking at different ways of how we
can save money as an organisation
has been awesome."
It was revealed last summer that 65
swimming pools had closed since
2019, with rising energy costs cited as
a significant reason.
But large ones can require billions
of gallons of water and millions of
pounds to keep cool.
Some are even built under water or in caves or very cold parts of the
world.
Mr Bjornsgaard went on to say: "Data
centres have got a huge problem with
heat. A lot of the money that it costs
to run a data centre is taken up in
getting rid of the heat.
"And so what we've done is taken
a very small bit of a data centre
to where the heat is useful and
required."
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