Deep Green, a British company, offers its customers cloud-based data storage, AI and machine learning computing and video rendering services. However, the company’s activity is not limited to these services, but it is pioneering the application of its technology to a completely different and surprising field: the heating of swimming pool water. Or, as the company puts it, a technology that “heats public swimming pools for free“. According to the company’s press release, the Exmouth Leisure Centre in Devon, South West England, is the first aquatic complex to benefit from the system.
According to data provided by the company, data centres account for 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, as Deep Green’s director Mark Bjornsgaard told the BBC, “a lot of the money that it costs to run a data centre is taken up in getting rid of the heat“. Indeed, large data centres require billions of litres of water and millions of euros for cooling. Some are built underwater, in caves or in cold parts of the world. In some cities in Denmark and Sweden, the heat generated by these data centres is used to power thousands of homes. Deep Green is now applying the same principle to the water heating of public swimming pools.
The British company has turned the hardware of its equipment into what it calls a “digital boiler“. Or, in other words, “a cloud data centre that efficiently transforms the heat from its servers into useful hot water“, in this case for heating the water in swimming pools. To do this, they immerse the data centre in mineral oil, which “captures 90% of the heat it produces”, and then pump it into a heat exchanger to heat the pool water. Deep Green supplies, installs and maintains its digital boilers free of charge, and pays for the energy they consume. After all, it is in the business of marketing the computing power of its units. In return, it only requires from the aquatic centres a space to install them and sufficient connection to the grid and the Internet.
In the case of the Exmouth leisure centre, the heat “donated” by the Deep Green unit “will reduce the pool’s gas requirements by 62%, saving them over £20,000 a year and reduce their carbon emissions by 25.8 tonnes“. Sean Day, director of the Devon leisure centre, told the BBC that its partnership with Deep Green “has helped reduce costs that have been astronomical over the last 12 months”.
Sources: Deep Green, BBC. Images: Deep Green.
