Using excess heat generated by data centers to warm homes isn’t a new idea. Earlier in our research we stumbled upon Qarnot, a french company proposing to decentralize the data center into meshed radiators to distribute computing resources across people’s homes (we’re guessing they took their name from Carnot’s Limit ;). They announced a partnership with the city of Paris to heat 350 low-income housings in 2013.
However, they are not the only rats in the race…
Stimergy: Apparently another French start-up proposing to install a centralized heating system for buildings under the form of a small data center distributing heat to the floors.
Project Exergy: are in proposing to match grid computing and energy relocation. They are currently fundraising on IndieGogo and have built a functional prototype (perhaps they were also inspired by thermodynamics for the name ;).
MtpvCorp: Is claiming to be in possession of a technology able to transform heat to energy. This could very well mean it could directly be applied to the data center instead of decentralizing it.
While the concepts seem applicable to our current infrastructure we however wonder if they are durable. Computer components are very likely to evolve in the direction of heat reduction.
