Open Compute urges local government to bask in the warm glow of excess datacenter heat

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Org that represents Meta, Google and Microsoft plans more heat reuse guidelines as debate over bit barn social license burns red hot

The Open Compute Project plans to deliver more guidance to local governments on how excess heat from datacenters can benefit their communities.

The project develops open-source and energy-efficient hardware for datacenter operators. Meta, Microsoft, and Google are all top-tier Platinum members, and are also all building datacenters as fast as they can, to house AI infrastructure.

Those builds have become controversial. Residents in communities flagged as sites for new bit barns have protested the quantity of water and energy they will consume, their potential to drive up prices for both, and the noise they emit. Some may be aware that datacenters create urban heat islands.

Protests about new datacenters have aleady turned violent. Governments have sometimes acknowledged concerns by implementing a moratorium on big builds, but on other occasions have indicated they might fast-track developments and brush aside red tape.

Into that febrile environment strode David Gardiner, Otto Van Geet, Jaime Comella, and Bharath Ramakrishnan, all of whom have participated in the OCP’s heat reuse group, with a Wednesday post extolling the virtues of datacenters when local governments are smart enough to tap excess heat that bit barns produce.

“Reusing datacenter waste heat presents a significant opportunity to provide carbon-free heating across a wide array of sectors, delivering substantial environmental, economic, and social benefits,” the post states.

They’re right. El Reg has reported on heat reuse helping to heat homes and grow vegetables. A swimming pool used during the Paris Olympics relied on heat from a nearby Equinix datacenter to keep its waters warm.

The OCP post laments the fact that local governments lack awareness about how they can tap excess datacenter heat. The authors also point to “a lack of connections between datacenters and nearby heat users [and] supranational, national, and sub-national policy to incentivize these projects,” and suggest that smart local governments will make heat reuse a requirement before greenlighting datacenter builds.

The post also, however, admits cost justification of datacenter heat reuse projects can be a challenge.

The heat reuse group’s Wiki includes form letters and other material it hopes activists will send to regulators to encourage them to consider use of heat recovery systems.

Providing that sort of material is a very common lobbying tactic. That OCP feels a need to highlight the availability of the resources at a time its members face opposition to their datacenter building plans is therefore more remarkable than the advice itself. ®