Edinburgh recycles heat from supercomputers to warm homes

Excess heat generated by the University of Edinburgh’s supercomputers is set to be used to warm local homes in a first-of-its-kind project that could help other higher education institutions slash emissions from energy-intensive facilities.

The institution has announced it will conduct a £2.6 million feasibility study that seeks to capture the heat and use it to warm water pooled in disused coal mines close to the university, which will then be transported and made available for heat pump technology.

Researchers believe at least 5,000 households could benefit from the pilot, which will also help the university reach its own net-zero goals.

The growing energy demands of large computing facilities have long been seen as a quiet environmental disaster for universities, far dwarfing emissions from other areas of operation.

Edinburgh hosts the national supercomputer, and its Advanced Computing Facility (ACF) is used for complex research such as climate and health data modelling.

It currently released up to 70 GWh of excess heat per year, Edinburgh said, but this was forecast to rise to 272 GWh, once the UK government’s recently announced next-generation Exascale supercomputer was installed at the university.

Sir Peter Mathieson, Edinburgh’s principal, said the project was a way of meeting its own net-zero commitments while delivering “direct benefits to people and influencing positive change locally and globally”.

The institution itself is putting in £500,000 and will work with industry and academic partners in the UK and overseas on the project, with a further $1 million (£800,000) in funding coming from the US Department of Energy.

“Capturing, storing and re-using waste heat is critically important to reaching net zero, and here we are learning and testing how best to do this in the ground, in legacy coal mine infrastructure,” said David Townsend, founder of geothermal company TownRock Energy, which will lead the project.

Around a quarter of UK homes are thought to sit above former mines and researchers said, if successful, the project could pave the way for seven million households to have their heating needs met this way.

Christopher McDermott, a professor in the School of Geosciences and the lead academic on the project, said disused coal mines flooded with water were “ideal heat sources for heat pumps”.

“With more than 800,000 households in Scotland in fuel poverty, bringing energy costs down in a sustainable way is critical, and using waste heat could be a game-changer,” he added.

tom.williams@timeshighereducation.com