Question 1

Can data centre waste heat be used for district heating?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Liquid-cooled compute returns 45–48 °C water to plate heat exchangers, which lift it to 50 °C district-energy utilities require. An energy transfer station meters the heat at the boundary between campus and utility — the same architecture already used in Vancouver-area neighbourhood energy systems. Air-cooled data centres cannot do this, because their reject heat is too low-grade to be worth moving.

Question 2

What is an energy transfer station (ETS)?

Accepted Answer

The metering and control boundary between two thermal systems. On a GRECO campus the ETS separates the data centre's hydronic loop from the district energy utility's network, transferring heat through plate exchangers while keeping the two hydraulically independent. It is where the heat is measured, and therefore where it becomes a sold product rather than a rejected by-product.

Question 3

What temperature does data centre heat need to be for district energy?

Accepted Answer

Modern low-temperature district energy networks operate at 50 °C, which liquid cooling can reach directly. Older high-temperature networks designed around 80–90 °C need a heat pump to bridge the gap, which costs electricity and erodes the economics. This is why the network a campus connects to matters as much as the cooling technology inside it.

Question 4

How much of a data centre's energy can be recovered as heat?

Accepted Answer

Close to all of the electrical input eventually becomes heat, and a liquid-cooled facility can capture roughly 90–97% of it at a useful temperature. The practical limit is not capture but demand: recovered heat is only worth anything where there is a customer close enough to take it year-round, which is why GRECO sites campuses near district energy networks rather than in remote locations.

Question 5

Is heat export a real revenue stream or an environmental gesture?

Accepted Answer

It is contracted revenue. A district-energy utility buys metered thermal energy under a long-term agreement in the same way a compute tenant buys capacity, which is what makes the same megawatt earn twice. It is also the environmental and community-benefit case that municipal and utility approvals increasingly turn on — displacing gas boilers in the buildings the network serves.

Energy transfer stations: heat, metered and sold