Heating a skyscraper with a data center: Amazon's one-of-a-kind solution
Once it's implemented, Amazon will save three-quarters of the electricity it would have bought for heat otherwise, according to McKinstry, a Seattle construction and energy services company. In addition, the operator of the data center, Clise Properties, will save a some money on electricity and a lot of water. Earlier this year, Clise and McKinstry formed a company called Eco District to design and build the system.
The idea makes so much sense that it prompts one to wonder why no one thought of this before.
Data centers use immense amounts of electricity and water to power and cool the servers and other equipment. This bothered the people at Clise, a commercial real estate company whose roots in Seattle reach back to the latter part of the 19th century. Company President Richard Stevenson said he would often ask himself if there isn't something Clise could do with the waste heat from the data center in the Westin Building on 2001 Sixth Ave.
Across the street, Amazon is building a four-block high-rise campus that will total more than 4 million square feet. Clise said his company's data center operations generate enough energy to heat the entire Amazon campus.
Think of the system as a loop. Water used to cool the data center will run from the Westin in a 14-inch pipe under Sixth Avenue to the basement of one of Amazon's high-rises, where a 400,000-gallon reservoir is going in, along with a heat recovery chiller plant. This plant will extract the heat that will be used to heat Amazon's buildings. The cooled down water will then run back under Sixth in a parallel pipe to the data center where it will be used again to extract more heat.
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