Motherboard

Maybe you, too, have fried your thighs under an old-school MacBook with a shoddy fan in an overstuffed meeting room or airplane. So then you have a good idea of just how much heat a computer kicks out. It’s not enough to really do anything with—besides the aforementioned—but get a bunch of processors in a bunch of rooms in a big building and, suddenly, we’re talking a ton of heat energy.

Now, you could either suck up even more energy with a cranked A/C system or you could do what an Academica Helsinki data center is doing and use that heat energy to heat homes. The 2MW database server center is in an old WW2 bomb shelter, and water used to cool the processors—heating itself up in the process—is planned to be used to heat about 500 homes, or 1,000 flats.

“There have been smaller implementations of similar systems,” Pietari Päivänen, head of sales at Academica, told The Guardian. “Data centres being used to heat parking lots. No one has conducted the heat towards a central heating system however.” Doing so, in this case, is saving Academica about $200,000 a year.

Figure as more and more storage and plain old computer processing moves into The Cloud, more and more data mega-facilities like this will need to be created. The future isn’t overheated laptops on thighs, it’s handheld devices in palms with all the trimmings, so to speak, centralized and shared. And consolidation leaves us with a whole ton of potential for pure energy recycling.

Notably, Google is building its own massive facility in Finland nearby, which will be using recycled water from the Baltic Sea to cool the facility, but no word on anything like this—though the company has made moves toward becoming a public utility, meaning it can sell energy services.

Looks like a good opportunity to not do any evil.

Read some more Motherboard coverage of things like jump roping for electricity and Japan’s grand plan for getting free, green energy from the Moon.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.