(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Private university Notre Dame will be using waste heat from some of its servers to provide a warm environment for a collection of conservatories and indoor botanical gardens located in South Bend, Indiana.
According to a report from Clean Technica, the Notre Dame’s containerized data center, built in a standard shipping container, will be positioned next to the South Bend Conservatory, providing a hot, arid climate for cacti and other desert plants in northern Indiana, which has cold, snowy winters, and boasts a lowest recorded temperature of -18°F for the month of December.
The partnership will save Notre Dame $100,000 in data cooling costs, and the city will save the $70,000 in heating bills for the conservatory, reducing its costs costs to $0, which is crucial for the South Bend Conservatory, which was threatened with closure in late 2006 due to budget concerns.
Heating costs had been scrapped entirely from the city’s 2010 budget, so this idea will be a lifeline for the conservatory. The project might be able to save it from shutting down for good.
This is just the latest example of data center waste heat being put to good use. Earlier this month, the WHIR reported on an Orthodox church in Helsinki, Finland that will be housing a computer room that will generate enough heat to warm 500 single-family houses.
The re-purposing of data center waste energy has also been experimented with elsewhere. As part of its billion-dollar Project Big Green initiative, IBM (www.ibm.com) launched a Zurich, Switzerland, facility that uses waste heat to warm up a public swimming pool for local residents.
