Meta: surplus heat to district heating
A Ramboll-designed energy centre is redistributing surplus heat from Meta’s data centre in Odense, Denmark, to the city’s district heating network. It's the largest Danish heat pump installation utilising surplus heat from a data centre.
- In January 2022, a tax on using surplus heat was abolished by the Danish parliament for businesses that are certified by the Danish Energy Agency, vastly improving the business case to deliver low-carbon excess heat.
- Data centres can deliver large amounts of surplus heat if they are connected to the district heating network. The heat has a relatively low temperature, which must be raised by a heat pump before it can be used
- To ensure a viable business case, data centres must be located close to a district heating network. The bigger the data centre, the farther the energy can be transported
- The European Commission suggests that all data centres of more than 1 MW should perform a cost benefit analysis to investigate whether the surplus heat can be used in the district heating supply
- According to the Danish Data Center Industry, 63%of data centres plan to utilise their surplus heat in the near future.
”The overall process from operating the servers to delivering heat is supported 100% by wind energy. Heat pumps are not a new invention, nor are coils for capturing heat. What is new and innovative is the pairing of these two in hyper scale.”
Our project is relatively unique because we have a very large distribution network. And Facebook [now Meta] has placed the data centre completely inside our distribution network, so we can utilise the energy very, very efficiently in our system
Jens Ole Hansen
Business Development Director, District Energy
+45 51 61 85 91
Anders Carøe
Senior Engineer
+45 51 61 49 55