An epoch of digital heat: IT industry heats up water in public swimming pools in England

A curious way to save electricity has been tested in England. It turned out that the IT industry is quite capable of solving one of the main problems of countries with a cold climate - the high cost of heating. Moreover, it can be solved solely at the expense of a by-product of its activities. About the startup Deep Green, which allowed the authorities of the small British town of Devon to save thousands of pounds, writes the BBC. It turned out that the heat generated by only one data center the size of a washing machine can heat up the water in the public pool of this city.

The concept that engineers have been working on for five years is relatively simple: hot mineral oil, in which computers were placed, to transfer its heat to it, is then fed into a heat exchanger to heat the water in the pool to a temperature of about 30C, and completely free of charge. The startup Deep Green itself charges customers for using its computing power for artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Interestingly, seven other pools in England have already joined the work of such a "digital boiler". But last summer, BBC News reported that 65 swimming pools had been closed in the country since 2019, and one of the main reasons for this was the increase in electricity costs.

The publication also notes that cooling large computer centers usually requires billions of liters of water and, accordingly, huge amounts of money: most of the money spent on operating a data center goes to get rid of heat. Moreover, some even specially build under water, or in caves, or in the coldest regions of the world, in order to cool them cheaper. For example, most of the critical cryptocurrency infrastructure is based on giant 2- and 3-storey warehouses in Iceland.

At the same time, it is known that in Danish and Swedish cities, huge data centers are already being used to illuminate residential neighborhoods with thousands of houses.