If data centres are anything, it’s being ridiculously energy hungry. Powering thousands of racks of servers, keeping facilities cool, lighting the building – they’re hardly the epitome of energy efficiency. But recently there’s been a focus on harnessing some of the waste energy produced by these server farms and putting them to good use.

Data centres are among the largest consumers of energy around the world,  and cooling is crucial because servers generate huge amounts of heat.

But now it seems that excess heat is the focus of a number of initiatives and startups looking to turn the waste energy into something useful – like heating homes.

Heating Homes With Data

The Nordics are increasingly being recognised as the ideal home for data centres, with global companies around the world interested in leveraging the region due to its clean energy focus and now there’s another reason as Nordic data centre operators Digiplex is reusing the waste heat generated to warm up 5,000 homes in Oslo as part of an ongoing sustainability drive.

The company will work with a local heating supplier, Fortum Oslo Varme, which operates a 60-mile heat distribution system throughout the Oslo district to redistribute the heat generated by its data centre, which is also renewably powered.

Gisle Eckhoff, CEO of Digiplex, said “Every time we go online, stream a TV series or use a cloud service, a process starts in a data centre. We, as individuals, have a larger impact on climate change if these processes are initiated in a data centre operated on non-renewable energy and more so from one where waste heat is released into the atmosphere.”

Digiplex entered into a similar initiative in Stockholm, Sweden, where the surplus warm air from its data centres will be used to heat 10,000 apartments.

A Growing Green Initiative Across Europe?

Digiplex is certainly not the first to link excess energy byproduct generated from data centres to greener initiatives. Dutch Startup Nerdalize has taken a different approach to its Nordic counterpart; you pay Nerdalize to install a server in your home – it heats your house for free – and Nerdalize makes money by selling the server space to other companies.

In 2017 Nerdalize planned to equip 42 Dutch households with servers to heat their water supply, providing, it says, hot showers using nothing more than data. The company says the setup would save customers €300 a year (£270) while costing companies 50% less for data services. Each installation also takes three tons of CO2 away from a household’s carbon footprint it claims.

The question then is could UK and Scottish data centres follow suit with similar schemes in an effort to become a more sustainable business operator? It would certainly be a more attractive proposition to homeowners instead of sinking data centres off the coast of Orkney.