Bert's wind

This week I visited Western Australia and stayed in a great B&B (bed and breakfast) in Albany located on the Southern coast. Albany was originally a whaling community at the end of the world, and it now has the greatest little wind farm on its horizon. I booked into Bert's B&B and he proudly showed off his heritage building, the lovely room with the heated towel rail which I soon turned off, thinking that it wasted energy.

Bert was very proud of the wind farm and told me about how the town derives most of its electricity from the turbines, located in the wildflowers on the beautiful coast line. And when I stumbled across this mosaic in the footpath on the way to the local pub, I suspected that there were many others in the region who felt like Bert. And somehow I felt better about Bert's heated towel rail!

Too Hot = Bonus Heating

According to a recent New Scientist Magazine (8/03/08), data centres worldwide consume 120 billion kwatt hrs of electricity and produce 2% global CO2 and rising.  About half of this is used to keep the servers cool.  

So IBM engineers in Switzerland have designed a new way of cooling the microchip surface using water piped into slabs positioned above the heat generating chip surface.  In theory, about 75% of this heat could be recovered.  The article suggested that a future medium sized data centre (around 1 Megawatt consumption) would be able to heat about 70 homes, in areas such as Europe where heating is an essential. 

  

On a more basic level, I also heard of a Pizza Restaurant redirecting excess heat from the ovens to provide a really cosy environment in winter.  That's got to be good for reducing the overall electricity bill as well as for the planet.  So, how much waste heat is your business generating each day, and where else could this excess heat be used?   

picture  called data centre floor by alexmuse ex flickr