Tiny Data Center Heats UK Swimming Pool with Powerful Efficiency

The Exmouth Aleisure Center in southwest England is experimenting with a novel way to lower its energy costs and carbon footprint by heating its indoor pool with heat from a tiny data center. The 25-meter swimming pool is heated to the appropriate temperature around 65 percent of the time thanks to an on-site device that collects heat produced by a bank of computers, reducing the need for gas boilers. The UK business Deep Green, which is in charge of the initiative, provides heat for free and pays all of its own energy expenses, but it charges users to use its computers, which are used to fuel machine learning and artificial intelligence.

It is mutually beneficial. At their main location, the Exmouth Leisure Centre, Deep Green CEO Mark Bjornsgaard told AFP that the company receives free computer cooling.

“The pool is doing us both an equally big favor.”

Bjornsgaard opened the door of a white box the size of a dishwasher to uncover computers submerged in mineral oil that absorbs heat.

The pool’s chilly water and the oil are then introduced to one another through a heat exchanger.

“Traditional data centers just exhaust that heat. 99 percent of this heat is squandered into the atmosphere, according to Bjornsgaard, who added that they utilize a tremendous quantity of water to drain the heat away.

Around half of the expense of operating a data center, according to Bjornsgaard, is spent on keeping the computers cool.

“Those expenses are not ours. Therefore, it’s a really excellent thing to do from an environmental and sustainable point of view,” he remarked.

‘Significant savings’

The introduction of Deep Green technology, according to Peter Gilpin, CEO of LED Community Leisure, which operates the swimming pool, has come “very timely” after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year caused energy costs to surge.

Before they erected the data center in March, the swimming pool’s yearly gas bill had more than quadrupled to close to £80,000 ($102,000), he said. Utilities typically make up approximately a third of the entire operating expenses of the leisure center.

We have been particularly badly struck by the growing cost of gas this winter, but Gilpin expressed optimism that the Deep Green technology would cover a significant percentage of our heating expenditures the next year.

Even if energy prices have decreased recently, they are already noticing “reductions in our gas consumption” and “significant savings” even though it is too early to measure the benefits over a lengthy period of time.

In addition to lowering energy expenditures and gas use, which was the main advantage, he said, “we also lessen our carbon footprint.”

Gilpin said that they are “proud” to have been the first location to use Deep Green’s technology and are already investigating implementing it at the other swimming pools they manage.

However, they could now face opposition.

Bjornsgaard said that their technology had seen “demand go through the roof” with hundreds of prospective locations throughout Europe wishing to use it, particularly swimming pools and district heating systems.

According to Bjornsgaard, Deep Green PCs are also “way cheaper than their normal cloud provider” and are being used by more and more businesses since they are “environmentally friendly”.

But we’re also contributing to society, right? We’re heating a pool and assisting swimming pools in remaining open,” he said.