Back to data centers

I mentioned the water footprint of data centers earlier this year (over here). Briefly, data centers use a lot of water to cool off the servers, water that comes in most cases from municipal supplies and which is returned to the supply as waste. (Hot or at least warm water is also detrimental to the environment. It doesn’t take much to affect fish spawning or amphibians or even the plant life.) So this new bit of news is hopefully a step in the right direction. A group in Switzerland is using the heated water from the data center, the waste water, to heat the buildings of a research center. Sounds like a similar method to geothermal heating.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t resolve the use of the large amounts of water for cooling, but at least they’re conserving electricity.