Grid Heating: Transforming Cooling Constraints Into Thermal Benefits

From 2006 to 2011 the U.S. national energy consumption for powering and cooling IT servers is estimated to grow from a cost of 4.5 to 7.4 billion dollars as reported by a recent EPA study [1] which included current efficiency improvement trends. With growing national concern for energy efficiency and environmental stewardship, current power utilization trends in HPC and data centers cannot continue to scale with computational demands. We introduce a new grid heating framework to promote the efficient growth and sustainment of commercial, academic, and government computation capabilities. We remove cooling expenditures while providing dynamic distributed heating benefits. Experimental results demonstrating temperature control and a municipal grid heating deployment are presented in support of our analytical estimates. We then discuss two example grid heating frameworks in the context of existing distributed computational infrastructures. Additional grid heating challenges and opportunities are reviewed in regards to development, implementation, and deployment.