Design and economic analysis of liquid cooled data centres for waste heat recovery: A case study for an indoor swimming pool

Abstract A vast amount of waste heat is produced in urban areas from a range of local sources such as metros, large buildings and urban waste. Data centres are another rapidly growing sector generating heat that could potentially be recovered and reused for heating and cooling. The integration of heat reuse solutions in the data centre industry will decrease the operational expenses by reducing the cooling demand and will create new business models by selling the excess heat to nearby heat demand applications. On one hand, the manuscript demonstrates how liquid cooled data centres can reduce the overall data centre consumption up to 30% in comparison with state-of-the-art air cooled data centres. On the other hand, the liquid cooling configuration of on-chip servers is evaluated numerically for a case study of an indoor swimming pool. For the best favourable solution, the data centre operator reduces its operational expenses and generates additional incomes by selling the excess heat, achieving a net present value after 15 years of 330,000 €. Moreover, the indoor swimming pool operator reduces its operational expenses 18%. Finally, the results of the case study are extrapolated to study the impact of heat reuse usage in Barcelona.