Meta data center in Odense supplies waste heat from servers to heat about 9 thousand homes
Waste heat from servers at Meta's Odense data center, 165 thousand megawatt-hours a year, goes into district heating; residents still pay bills.
In Odense, Denmark, heat produced by computer servers at a data center of Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is used directly to heat homes, according to sozcu.com.tr. sozcu.com.tr
sozcu.com.trsozcu.com.trOpen source ↗ The equipment runs 24 hours a day without interruption. Heat that is normally released into the atmosphere to cool the devices now reaches homes through dedicated pipelines.
Heat capture and temperature boost
The data center uses a water-based cooling system to keep processing equipment from overheating. The system captures the resulting waste energy and reuses it. The collected heat is carried through underground pipes to the nearby Tietgenbyen heat plant.
At the plant, large heat pumps raise the water temperature to between 70 and 75 degrees. The water is then fed into the city's district heating network.
Volume, supplier and household bills
According to current data shared by Meta, the facility yields 165 thousand megawatt-hours of waste heat per year. sozcu.com.tr
sozcu.com.trsozcu.com.trOpen source ↗ This heat is handed over to the local heating company Fjernvarme Fyn free of charge. The infrastructure has been expanded in stages since 2020, and today the annual heating needs of about 9 thousand homes are met by waste energy from these computers alone.
Free supply of waste heat to the local utility does not mean that households heat their homes free of charge. Electricity needed to keep the heat pumps running, periodic maintenance of the pipelines and uninterrupted distribution of hot water to a large number of homes create significant operating costs. For this reason, residents of the area continue to pay bills that cover distribution and operation.
