Disneyland Paris is partnering with French energy provider Dalkia to showcase a green way to turn waste heat from its data centres into heating and hot water at a business park.
Dalkia revealed that it will soon open its first district heating network in the Val d’Europe business park in Marne-la-Vallée near Paris. A BBC video of the building of the greenfield business park, which is mostly reportedly owned by Eurodisney, the operator of Disneyland Paris, can be found here.
This district-wide heating network will be fuelled by energy recovered from a 8,000 square metre data centre on the site.
The way it works is that the waste heat produced by the data centre’s air conditioning systems, will be collected and recovered, and then transmitted to the heating network at the Val d’Europe business park via a heat exchanger.
It said this district-wide heating network will eventually supply green energy to buildings with a surface area of 600,000 square metres (6,458,350 sq. ft.).
“As a result, 100 percent green energy is made available to the companies and buildings at the park. More than 5,400 metric tons of CO2 emissions will be saved each year,” it said.
Dalkia was supported by the French Environment and Energy Management Agency (Ademe), but the energy provider is responsible for the design, installation and management of this new private network.
The Dalkia heating network is very similar to what Microsoft researchers proposed back in July, when they published a paper suggesting that cloud computing servers should be distributed to homes where they can act as a “data furnace”, essentially heating the building.
In the UK we of course call our furnaces “boilers”, but the idea is that these so-called data furnaces (DFs) would heat homes, and could save around £184 ($300) per server per year compared to a conventional data centre.
The DF would use the home broadband network to hook up with the rest of the cloud, providing virtual machines for Internet-based services – while the house-owner would buy it just like a central heating boiler, and pay for the heat it produces.
It should be noted that the concept of using waste heat from computer to heat nearby structures is not a new one. Indeed, Alchemy’s data centre in Shetland does just that.
But Microsoft’s idea of turning our homes into micro-data centres with around 40 to 400 CPUs, which could be the heat source for a family home, seems somewhat unrealistic.
Undersea internet and power cable in Baltic sea between Finland and Estonia suffers outage. Finland…
The Biden Administration has launched a last-minute investigation into older Chinese-made legacy semiconductors - weeks…
State media reports the Iranian regime has lifted the ban on WhatsApp and Google Play,…
Landmark ruling finds NSO Group liable on hacking charges in US federal court, after Pegasus…
Microsoft reportedly adding internal and third-party AI models to enterprise 365 Copilot offering as it…
Albania to ban access to TikTok for one year after schoolboy stabbed to death, as…
View Comments
This is such a clever idea, so much energy is being wasted inadvertently as most computers and engines actually give off more heat than required energy. So if it could be utilised in the right way especially on a large scale, such as with Disney then we would be able to reduce energy usage. This is obviously not going to save the planet as all machines give off some heat and are never 100% efficient, but it is a step in the right direction.