A BBC story detailing how an Essex couple are heating their home with a data centre in their shed lit up LinkedIn over the weekend.
Braintree’s Terrence and Lesley Bridges have become the first people in the country to trial the ‘HeatHub’ scheme, which was developed by Thermify and is part of UK Power Networks’ SHIELD project.
Their energy bills have dropped from £375 to as low as £40 since they swapped their gas boiler for a HeatHub – a small data centre packed with more than 500 computers, according to the report.
The number of UK data centres is poised to rise by almost a fifth, stoking concerns about their huge energy and water consumption requirements.
Microsoft recently made a further $15.5bn in additional capital commitments to the UK, as part of wider plans among the US tech giants to transform the UK into an “AI superpower”.
Barn of necessity
HeatHub’s outhouse ingenuity immediately drew praise from the IT industry on LinkedIn, with Corin Hawthorne of engineering outfit Dowds saying it shows the UK can take a leaf from the Nordics’ book by “connecting data, energy and heat with purpose”.
“Waste heat from digital infrastructure is one of the largest untapped energy sources in the UK and Ireland,” he wrote.
“We treat it as a by product. It is a resource waiting to be used. One shed can heat a home. A cluster can heat a street. A campus can heat a hospital.”
Steven Kiernan, VP EMEA at analyst Omdia, called it a “cool story”.
“This approach is clearly a drop in the ocean amid the rampant energy demands from data centres. Still, kudos to anyone bringing innovative solutions to address the tech industry’s critical energy and sustainability challenges,” he wrote.
The Bridges’ HeatHub will eventually be part of a “remote and distributed” data centre, involving many units processing data for customers, Thermify co-founder and CEO Travis Theune told the BBC.
