Use of Waste Heat: AI Queries As Heating Elements

Datacenters are increasingly becoming a factor in energy policy due to their rapidly rising power consumption and usable waste heat. An article from Handelszeitung featuring an assessment by our president, Babak Falsafi.

The demand for electricity from datacenters in Switzerland will increase significantly in the coming years. While electricity consumption in 2013 was still around 1.7 terawatt hours (TWh) per year (around 2.8% of total consumption at that time), consumption in 2019 was already around 2.1 TWh, which corresponded to 3.6%.

Current estimates for 2024 range from 3.5 to 4.5 TWh – i.e., 6 to 8 percent of Switzerland's electricity consumption. “This trend is likely to continue,” says Babak Falsafi, President of the Swiss Datacenter Efficiency Association (SDEA). By 2030, consumption is expected to rise to around 6 to 9 TWh per year, which is about 10 to 15 percent of the country's current consumption.

Increasing energy efficiency

As capacity grows, so does the potential for waste heat utilization. “This has only been used to a limited extent so far, but could make a significant contribution to the decarbonization of heating networks if integrated into the built environment,” says Falsafi. An efficient building is of little use if the servers are hardly being utilized. Average server utilization is only around 7 to 15 percent, which means that most of the installed computing power is not being used effectively.

There is also potential for optimization in building infrastructure. Modern datacenters can now be built in such a way that they hardly need to be actively cooled and can reuse the waste heat they generate directly. Technological advances such as liquid cooling – i.e., the direct liquid cooling of server components – enable operation without conventional refrigeration machines. Immersion cooling goes one step further, immersing the entire IT system in a special liquid to dissipate heat particularly efficiently.

“In Switzerland, there are currently hardly any binding requirements for the energy efficiency of datacenters,” says Falsafi. “In practice, this means that anyone who wants to be seriously efficient has to take action themselves.” The biggest levers are not in the regulations, but in the responsibility of the operators of both the datacenters and the IT.

Full Article in German