This year has started with freezing cold weather and another energy price cap rise, and I’m bracing myself for a massive heating bill this month.
Like many of us, I’m wondering how, apart from wearing long johns and more jumpers, I can stay warm without breaking the bank. And, as with so many things these days, it seems AI could have an answer – although not in the way you might expect.
It has nothing to do with harnessing clever algorithms. Instead, new schemes seek to take the heat generated by the computers used to run chatbots and other forms of AI and use it to warm our homes.
ChatGPT may only have launched three years ago, but its rise has been so rapid that already most Brits are using it – around 70 per cent of us, according to one survey.
But using generative AI tools to create work emails, get financial advice or write a song in the style of your favourite artist is so complicated that it requires unprecedented amounts of computer power for data processing and storage.
This is being done by a new generation of “hyperscale” data centres which host hundreds of thousands to millions of computer servers, far larger than anything that was needed before the rise of AI.
The biggest of these hyperscale centres to be given planning permission in the UK so far will see 10 data halls built over 540,000 square metres on the site of a former power station at Cambois, near Blyth in Northumberland, at a cost of £10bn.
There are big environmental downsides to these enormous datacentres. Thames Water has said a large data centre can use between four and 19 million litres of water per day, equivalent to the daily demand of 50,000 households. And they can use between 20 and more than 100 megawatts of electricity – roughly the amount used by a town of around 150,000 people.
This might not be so bad if there were just a handful of these centres. But the UK already has almost 500 sizeable data centres and there are an estimated 100 to 200 hyperscale data centres in the planning system, as the Government sees them as a way to boost the sluggish economy.
Economics aside, however, there is another potential benefit to data centres. A report commissioned by the Greater London Authority found that London’s existing data centres are releasing enough waste heat to warm up to half a million homes each year, and more and more projects are underway to reroute wasted heat from data centres into warm households.
Given that this is heat that would have been generated anyway, it is a clean and cheap form of heating. As Jan Rosenow, an Oxford academic who has advised Ofgem, the International Energy Agency and the European Commission, told me: “Data centres are very energy hungry and generate a lot of waste heat. In principle, using this waste heat makes sense.”
In Finland, the heat generated by the data centres is already being used to heat homes and plans for similar schemes are starting to pop up here. One of the first of these will be in Milton Keynes, where wasted heat from data centres will be transported along a 20km network of underground water pipes to heat buildings in the city. On a much smaller scale, a swimming pool in Devon is being warmed by a data centre the size of a washing machine.
And individual households are now starting to get in on the act. Terrence and Lesley Bridges from Braintree in Essex were the first in a trial of 300 households in the UK to swap their gas boiler for their own backyard mini data centre. The memory banks of more than 500 computers are now housed in their garden shed, and they are saving £335 a month on their energy bills as a result.
The data centre measures about a metre high and wide and 1.5 metres long. The kit inside is submerged in oil, which heats up. That heat is then transferred using a heat exchanger into the couple’s hot water system, from which it can heat radiators and provide warm water. Their bills now come in at between £40 and £60 each month.
Part of the reason the Bridges’ monthly savings came down quite so much is because they also had solar panels and a battery put in as part of UK Power Networks’ SHIELD project which is focused on helping low-income households with the transition to net zero. This enables them to turbocharge their savings by allowing them to store some of their unused energy for later use and to sell other excess electricity generated into the national grid.
The Bridges’ new heating system is made by the green tech company Thermify. Its servers aren’t as big or as powerful as those needed to power AI; instead Thermify sells this server power to businesses to run specific tasks, such as running a coffee chain’s loyalty programme or producing a supermarket firm’s quarterly report.
Even without solar panels and a battery, the cost savings for heating alone can be significant. Thermify estimates that, once its scheme is properly up and running – and after spending £3,000 to buy and install a unit – a typical three bedroom home will pay £50 a month for heating.
By contrast, the average gas bill for a three-bedroom house in the UK is £840 a year, according to British Gas.
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It is far too early to know how much of a contribution data centres large and small can make to the UK’s power needs, or indeed whether Thermify’s numbers stack up for more households than the Bridges’ – if you have a gas cooker, for instance, that will keep your bills slightly higher.
But UK Power Networks, which manages the “last mile” of cables and substations delivering electricity from the National Grid to households across London and the south of England, plans to install 100,000 of these mini data centre heating systems a year in the UK within four years.
So, we can at least keep ourselves warm with the knowledge that the positive side-effects of the AI revolution could soon come to sheds across the country – even if, for this week, an extra blanket will have to do.
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