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A new use for excess data centre heat

An innovative use for excess heat, which takes the data centre's remote location into account

Norwegian data centre company Green Mountain is teaming up with Norwegian Lobster Farm (NLF), to use waste heat from its data centres to regulate the temperature of the land-based shellfish smallholding.

'To grow optimally, the lobster needs a temperature of 20°C in the seawater,' Green Mountain said in a press release.

'This is exactly the temperature of the seawater that has been used to cool the IT equipment in Green Mountain's datacentre. Green Mountain can therefore deliver this heated wastewater directly to the fish farm.'

The project can help to significantly lower the overall carbon footprint of both firms.

NLF is one of the only firms in the world to rear lobsters in a land-based fish farm.

While the project is challenging, the market prospects are great, considering the fact that lobster demand in Europe is high but supply is limited.

Green Mountain's liquid-cooled DC1-Stavanger data centre facility, on Rennesøy island near Stavanger, draws seawater from a fjord with a temperature of 8°. Once the water has served its purpose of keeping the server farm cool, the heated water - now at 20° - is released back into the fjord.

Green Mountain has explored various ways to reuse excess heat, but most were impractical due to the data centre's remote location.

If a data centre is located near urban residential areas, the waste heat can be used to heat houses; but in case of DC1-Stavanger, the facility is too far from any residental areas for this to be practical.

Using Green Mountain's heated water in the lobster farm, instead, will help to eliminate the need for an expensive recycling aquaculture technology system the facility currently uses.

NLF said it will build a facility next to the Green Mountain data centre some time later this year.

"In practice, this means that we can scale up production with reduced technical risk, as well as save both investment and operating costs," said Asbjørn Drengstig, chief executive of Norwegian Lobster Farm.

It will also have "environmental benefits," he added.

Many tech firms have joined hands and signed key declarations to combat the issue impacting Earth's environment in recent years.

Earlier this month, data centre firm CyrusOne announced that all its data centre facilities in Europe were now running on a 100 per cent renewable energy tariff. The company pledged to become carbon-neutral by 2040 last year.

Last month, Google announced that five of its major data global centre sites were running on around 90 per cent carbon-free power. Google had earlier said that it was aiming for all of its data centres, cloud regions and office campuses to run on clean electricity for every hour of the day within a decade.

A new use for excess data centre heat

An innovative use for excess heat, which takes the data centre's remote location into account

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