Dublin university campus gets heat from AWS data center
The Technological University of Dublin’s Tallaght campus is using the excess heat from a nearby Amazon Web Services data center to warm its students.
The Irish university has been using the excess heat in its own heating and ventilation system since 2023, CNBC reported. According to one expert, this manner of heat exchange is not especially cost-effective, but the heat would go to waste if the university did not used it.
According to the International District Energy Association, similar heat systems can be found in 165 supermarkets across Europe, most of them in Denmark. The stores’ refrigerators reportedly channel heat back into their facilities’ heating vents.
According to one scientific research paper, waste heat recovery, or WHR, is a “promising” way of improving energy efficiency, and the technique has proved “feasible.” Researchers found that using waste heat for other purposes, such as cooling or power production, is also “feasible,” but requires converting energy between types, which causes energy loss.
