Amazon Recycles Data Center Waste Heat to Warm Buildings

Amazon has built a system in which its new dome-shaped buildings & towers will be warmed with recycled heat from nearby data centers. The idea was first proposed in 2014 when Amazon decided to implement this new technology to warm the Denny Triangle campus in Seattle which is under construction at the moment.

Data centers use a tremendous amount of water and electricity to cool and power the running servers and other such equipment. This heat can be ‘recycled’ to warm any buildings in its vicinity.  This idea is the brainchild of Clise, a real estate company in Seattle owning the Westin Building datacenter, with McKinstry dealing with the technical aspects of the project, and the City of Seattle helping broker the agreement between the three entities.

The heat generated from Westin Building’s Pacific Northwest telecom hub will be recycled to warm Amazon’s Denny Triangle Campus. The buildings stretch across 4 blocks, totaling more than 4 million square feet in area. It includes three offices and the revolutionary glass spheres of the building. Although Amazon moves in the building after 2 years, the heating system is fully functioning as of now.

The process is called Hydronic Heat. It works by transferring the heat accumulated in the data center to 14-inch water pipes, circulating around 3,000 gallons of water per minute, which travel below the earth’s surface to Amazon’s central heating system. Once all the heat is lost to the building, the water is sent back to the data center in order to cool the servers and other units in the datacenter. The system has the capacity to heat 365 homes a year, yet another testament to the scale of the project.

This recycling system is 4 times more efficient than traditional heating systems, and will eventually save 80 million kilowatt-hours of energy over the next 25 years, easing the load on power grids in the area.

Amazon does not own the datacenter, rather will pay for the energy at a discount. This innovation is merely a partnership to inspire other tech companies to follow the same approach for a much greener world.

Ash Awad, CMO of McKinstry, said, “This is the first really large high-rise project that has been able to take advantage of this amount of waste heat, the first of its kind. And buildings that rely on older electric-heating systems can’t take advantage of a hydronic heating system, which uses water to carry heat through the building. Waste-heat recovery isn’t a new concept, but usually it happens within a building with a single property owner, not between owners of different properties.”