My teenage son regularly complains about his room being too warm, even during winter. While the rest of the house is at a comfortable temperature, the video game PC he plays emits a significant amount of heat.
Now, that pilot is scaling up and 150 public swimming pools could soon be recycling excess heat and cutting their energy bills at the same time. There were approximately 10,978 data centres worldwide in 2023. With increasing online connectivity, expansion of AI applications and cloud services, many more data centres will be needed in the future.
There is a growing awareness of the need to reuse excess heat in cities to reduce the impact on the environmental. Public swimming pools offer one ideal solution. Economic difficulties due to rising energy prices could have a potential negative public health effect due to the lack of swimming pool facilities driven by high energy costs. So the successful use of waste heat from data centres to heat swimming pools could have many benefits.