Sign of Hyperscale Times: Microsoft Supplying Data Center Waste Heat to Danish Community
Microsoft is creating a partnership to reroute waste heat from one of its Denmark data centers to provide district energy supply to a Danish city.
The collaboration with district heating utility Høje Taastrup Fjernvarme and heat transmission firm VEK will deliver waste heat generated by the Microsoft data center activity and transferred to supply about 6,000 homes in Høje Taastrup.
The project, as reported in Data Center Dynamics, is relatively new for Microsoft. Data centers can generate 1 MWh of heat for every 1 MWh of electrical energy consumed at the facility, according to reports; thus, a 100-MW data center could generate 100 MW of waste heat potential.
Many data centers, particularly AI factories, will be hyperscale in the future and exceed 1 GW of on-site data and energy consumption capacity. Most data centers are currently air cooled, although the future of AI computing is aiming at utilizing more efficient liquid cooling technologies.
These increasing pressures of energy and cooling demand could force hyperscalers to become transparent and transactional in their infrastructure agreements.
“For me, it is non-negotiable that data centers have to become more transparent,” Max Schulze, head of the Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance, said in an interview quoted by his organization LinkedIn. “We can only calculate the true potential of waste heat if we know the difference between capacity and actual power consumption.”
Other hyperscalers are moving forward with projects to use their waste heat. For instance, Amazon Web Services is supplying heat from one of its Dublin data centers to the Technological University’s Tallaght campus.
The International Energy Agency has theorized that data centers could supply up to 300 terawatt hours of space heating if fully integrated into district energy networks by 2030.
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About the Author
Rod Walton, EnergyTech Managing Editor
Managing Editor
For EnergyTech editorial inquiries, please contact Managing Editor Rod Walton at [email protected].
Rod Walton has spent 17 years covering the energy industry as a newspaper and trade journalist. He formerly was energy writer and business editor at the Tulsa World. Later, he spent six years covering the electricity power sector for Pennwell and Clarion Events. He joined Endeavor and EnergyTech in November 2021.
Walton earned his Bachelors degree in journalism from the University of Oklahoma. His career stops include the Moore American, Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise, Wagoner Tribune and Tulsa World.
EnergyTech is focused on the mission critical and large-scale energy users and their sustainability and resiliency goals. These include the commercial and industrial sectors, as well as the military, universities, data centers and microgrids. The C&I sectors together account for close to 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S.
He was named Managing Editor for Microgrid Knowledge and EnergyTech starting July 1, 2023
Many large-scale energy users such as Fortune 500 companies, and mission-critical users such as military bases, universities, healthcare facilities, public safety and data centers, shifting their energy priorities to reach net-zero carbon goals within the coming decades. These include plans for renewable energy power purchase agreements, but also on-site resiliency projects such as microgrids, combined heat and power, rooftop solar, energy storage, digitalization and building efficiency upgrades.