NThis is a game of thought, but in a few years, many data centers in Frankfurt can make a significant contribution to the city’s heating.Constantin Alsheimer, CEO Minova ag, Announced on Thursday that the energy supplier’s district heating network will be expanded in the next few years so that the data center can send waste heat from its cooling equipment to it. For example, in the next few years, a new line will be laid along Hanauer Landstrasse, where there are a large number of data centers that have so far discharged warm exhaust gas into the environment.
Whether the operators will send them into the city’s supply network in the future will largely depend on the success of Frankfurt Gallus’ first such project. A new residential area called Westville is currently being built there. The thermal cycle there should be closed within two years: project developer Instone Real Estate is building 1,300 apartments on the former Telenorma site, and neighboring data center operator Telehouse is supplying energy-rich raw materials to provide them with hot water And heating. Mainova is responsible for the technical implementation. This sounds easy, but technically speaking, this is uncharted territory-and so far the largest project of its kind in Germany.
60% target
The biggest difficulty is that a large amount of waste heat in the remote house data center is provided in the form of heated cooling water, but this is only warm, not hot. From the data center to the technical center in the residential area, a temperature of about 30 degrees Celsius is provided through a 500-meter cable, which requires 70 degrees. As the project manager Kolja Franssen explained, this difference is balanced in the two heat pumps, where water is heated, but electricity is also consumed. The first one makes it reach 60 degrees, the second then reaches 70 degrees. However, compared to a cycle that uses cold water, the energy used is reduced by about 80%, Franson said.
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So far, relevant personnel have assumed that 60% of the heat supply comes from remote house energy. The rest comes from Mainova’s district heating network, which is also used on particularly cold days or emergency situations where Telehouse services are temporarily unavailable. In this way, in a residential area with about 3,000 people, 3 kindergartens, restaurants, and a supermarket, 400 tons of carbon dioxide can be reduced each year.
Future residents can also save directly. Ralf Werner, who is in charge of Instone Rhine-Main, announced that because Telehouse is abandoning its energy, the price of district heating can be cheaper than other parts of the city. The contract with the data center operator is valid for 15 years. During this period, participants hope that their example should set a precedent. Mainova’s boss Alsheimer said that for the energy transition, technological openness is needed. As far as Frankfurt is concerned, district heating is basically a very promising technology-if its source of heating is not just a power plant. For this reason, the network is being modified so that heating can be supplied even at lower temperatures, thereby reducing the energy used by power plants.
The data center provides itself as a supplier. There are already more than 60 in Frankfurt and they are still under construction. Just three months ago, a plan called DC-Heat composed of scientists, companies, and municipalities calculated that, at least on paper, by 2030, all office and residential buildings in the city will have full use of data centers Even with Gallus’ first project, “Frankfurt, the world’s largest internet hub and data center hotspot, will lay the foundation for becoming a climate-neutral data center,” praised Mayor Peter Feldmann (SPD).
This idea can be traced back to Béla Waldhauser, managing director of Telehouse Deutschland GmbH, a Japanese group. Originally, he met with Werner, the boss of Instone, to discuss possible difficulties in the neighborhood between the data center and the residential area. In the end, this cooperation plan came out, and the city government and Minova were quickly convinced. “My thought opened the door,” Waldhauser said.
