The residual heat generated by
the Equinix data centre on the A10 Amsterdam ring road will partly be used to
heat the University of Amsterdam buildings in the city’s science park, the Parool has reported.
In the
future, Equinix hopes to deliver the remainder of its surplus heat to the
district heating network known as stadsverwarming which already heats some
70,000 homes in the capital, the paper said.
In 2016, Amsterdam city council
published a plan to rid the city of gas-fired cooking and central heating by
2050. The city has plans to build 50,000 new homes within the next 10 years and
none will have gas heating or cooking facilities.
Instead, the homes will be heated
by surplus heat generated by industry – and server farms are an excellent
source. There are some 35 data centres in and around Amsterdam and Schiphol
airport, each holding tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of
computers which are at work day and night.
Together, they generate enough
surplus heat to warm up half of Amsterdam, Stijn Grove of the Dutch Data Centre
Association told the paper. The DDA estimates that a single 30,000 m2 server
farm generates as much heat as the entire catering sector – hotels, restaurants
and cafés – used in 2015.
But many
problems still have to be ironed out before the excess heat created at the data
centres can be used to heat Amsterdam. Chief among these is transport –
expensive pipelines are necessary – and the need to raise the temperature of
the residual warmth to residential standards.
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