A gigantic warehouse in the northeast of Paris has a labyrinth of windowless corridors outside, just outside the city. Behind rows and rows of unidentified black doors, behind which, disposable headphones are visible to shield visitors from the sound.
These are the amazing insides of one of France’s newest data centres, completed earlier this year, which is now being used to heat the fresh Olympic Aquatics Center—visible from the information center’s roof. When US floating sun Katie Ledecky won her seventh Olympic gold medal last year, she did it by speeding through water heated, at least in part, by the data center’s technology.
This noisy website, known as PA10, is owned by Equinix, an American data center company. Its whirring noise indicates that the company’s heating systems are attempting to lower the temperature of its consumers ‘ computer machines. ” PA10 is specially made for high-density containers”, says the site’s info core expert Imane Erraji, pointing to a castle of machines capable of teaching AI.
The data centre has been converting warm weather waste into water for the past month to feed into Engie‘s neighborhood energy system. When it runs at full power, Equinix expects to trade 6.6 thermal megawatts of heat out of the building—the parallel of more than 1, 000 properties.
According to projections, AI will soon be able to increase the amount of energy that data centers need, according to Equinix, which predicts that by 2020, officials will work to reduce the impact of the looming cost of energy by including data centers into the infrastructure that keeps cities hot.
Erraji describes the job as a “win-win position” for both Equinix and the nearby suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis. According to her, Equinix can pipe the steam out of the tower, saving the city from having to work so hard, according to her. After the project received a 2215027″}” href=”https://www.usine-digitale.fr/article/a-saint-denis-le-centre-aquatique-olympique-et-1000-logements-seront-chauffes-par-un-data-center.N2215027″ rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>€2 million ($ 2.1 million ) investment from the city of Paris, Equinix has committed to providing the energy free-of-charge for 15 years. In June, the governor of Seine-Saint-Denis, Mathieu Hanotin, even called attention to the economic benefits, claiming that using the information center as an electricity supply will give the place 1, 800 metric tons of CO2 emissions per year.
The International Energy Agency ( IEA ) notes that France has a “very low-carbon electricity mix,” with 62 percent of its electricity coming from nuclear sources. And critics say multiplying heat-reuse projects are a distraction from the real issue: the amount of land, water, and electricity data centers consume. ” When the data centers are already here, of course it’s better to reuse the heat than do nothing”, says Anne-Laure Ligozat, computer science professor at France’s National School of Computer Science for Industry and Business ( ENSIIE ). The number of data centers and their energy consumption are the issue, though. Without the data center, she adds, having a simple electricity heating system would have a lower environmental impact.
Researchers come to the conclusion that these heat reuse projects are logical once data centers are constructed. ” It makes a significant difference”, says Shaolei Ren, an associate professor specializing in sustainable computing at the University of California, Riverside. According to Ren, cooling technology can account for 50 % of a data center’s overall energy consumption. ” If companies reuse the heat, essentially, they are slashing the energy required for cooling”.
However, where data centers get their power from must be scrutinized in order to make claims that there are benefits to heat-reuse projects. Renewable energy sources, such as power purchase agreements ( PPAs ), where tech companies pay wind or solar farms for the equivalent amount of power they produce, are completely” covered” by Equinix, according to Equinix.
” At this point, there’s no data center that’s running entirely on renewables”, says Ren. ” When tech companies claim to be running their data centers on renewables, or say they’re carbon neutral, they’re referring to carbon offsetting, which means they plug their data center into the power grid and they are doing some offsetting methods elsewhere”. For instance, PPA-based businesses do n’t always purchase renewable energy from the same nation where their data centers are located.
The Olympic pool’s crowds ‘ roar may have been more loud than the nearby Equinix data center’s whirring over the past nine days. However, skepticism persists regarding this expanding industry and the disruption that AI is expected to cause in Paris, as well as elsewhere in Europe. The debate over continuing to build data centers and the applications they should serve is Ligozat’s main concern. Should we keep building data centers, in my opinion, is the main inquiry? she says. ” And not, should we reuse the heat”?
