The UK government has announced £90 million ($119 million) in funding to build and modernize heating networks to remove heat from data center equipment for home heating and other purposes. Report Register. According to the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), the new scheme will provide more than 750,000 homes with cheaper heating services.
In particular, a major project is planned to distribute hot water through a tunnel under the River Thames. £41 million ($54 million) is being allocated for the project, which the ministry claims will provide “clean heating” to more than 650,000 London homes alone. The aim is to reduce the UK capital’s reliance on natural gas. Similar programs have been in place for decades in cities such as Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Vienna and Berlin.
As early as 2023, there were reports that authorities planned to provide data center heating for 10,000 new homes in west London. Meanwhile, with the necessary tunnels and pipes largely unavailable, London is planning an even more fantastic project – transporting hot water 25 kilometers a day down the Thames from a waste treatment plant by electric barge. The first phase will cost them £41 million. Construction of the barges is scheduled to begin in 2028, and they hope to build the tunnels and pipelines in the 2030s. How much it will cost is anyone’s guess.
Additionally, there is currently no data showing whether data center heat usage is as efficient as it should be. The Uptime Institute reports that data center waste heat is often not hot enough to heat homes, so water must be heated additionally, such as using heat pumps, which themselves require energy. In 2024, TradeUK released a report stating that the latest fifth-generation heating networks can handle the low-temperature heat provided by data centers, but the UK still mainly uses third-generation networks, which have low energy efficiency and high carbon footprints.
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However, an EnergiRaven survey of Britons found that around 60% believe planning permission for new data centers should be granted based on a business’s willingness to provide “excess” heat to heat local homes and businesses. 62% of respondents stated that they would be more favorable to a data center project in their region if the project included similar heat transfer capabilities.
Omdia said it was unclear whether the government’s new measures would use heat from existing data centers, which would create a host of additional problems, or new data centers. However, analysts believe that anything that can help reduce reliance on natural gas will be beneficial. But the project of the British authorities is more of a concept and implementation by the national administration will not help. Furthermore, experience shows that the costs of such exotic undertakings can subsequently increase significantly.
Other central heating systems can also rely on DESNZ funding, including. We are talking about the expansion of the existing network in Solihull (West Midlands), a project in the Marble Arch area of London to provide heating for offices, homes, hotels and industry in the Oxford Street area, and a project in the borough of Bexley and Greenwich that will be able to heat up to 100,000 homes once completed.
There are a number of projects in various stages of use across the UK to use heat from data centers to heat homes. For example, British Gas and Thermal Towers Deployed The servers of the cloud platform are located in residential buildings. Each server is connected to a home heating system that stores heat. Himiko will help Connecting 9,000 homes in the UK from the data center to the heating network. UK Power Networks (UKPN) here we go Installing a single-board Raspberry Pi-based micro data center to heat homes with utility bills.
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