Analysis of a district heating system using waste heat in a distributed cooling data center

Abstract With the rapid development of the data center industry, a major source of waste energy is created through the increasing demand for cloud-based connectivity and performance. A recent study demonstrated that data centers are responsible for approximately 1.3% of total global electricity usage. In addition, nearly 40% of this power is consumed by computer room air conditioning (CRAC) systems for cooling the servers, which creates a significant stream of waste heat. The waste heat in a data center has a low quality; therefore, recovery and reuse of the waste eat is a challenge. In this study, a district heating system solution using waste heat in a data center was introduced. A distributed cooling solution was discussed to improve the quality of this waste heat. Then, heat pump technology was used to further raise the quality. The energy-saving effect was theoretically compared with coal-fired heating. A new index PUE wh was defined to evaluate the power utilization effectiveness of the data center with the heat recovery system. This waste heat district heating solution was implemented at a data center in Hohhot, China, and measurements demonstrated that the PUE wh of this data center was 0.13.