Deep Green gets £200M from power supplier to scale waste heat reuse

Datacenter operator Deep Green has bagged £200 million ($254 million) from power provider Octopus Energy to help scale deployments that give municipal sites free heat in exchange for cooling its IT hardware. Deep Green is a startup that aims to deploy more datacenters “in the community”, including as part of district heating …

[Jellied Eel]

The lawyers of thermodynamics would like a look at the contract.

Deep Green has operated this business model for at least a year. We last discussed the tech when it was deployed at Exmouth Leisure Centre in southwest England, where the waste heat from a dozen of the company’s servers was being used to warm the swimming pool. This was expected to reduce the pool's energy requirements by 62 percent, and save the site more than £20,000 ($25,430) a year on heating bills.

But.. has it?

https://www.exmouthjournal.co.uk/news/23349026.exmouth-leisure-centre-highlights-rising-energy-costs/

LED say their utility costs have increased by over £300,000 since 2020 with nearly £100,000 attributed to Exmouth Leisure Centre, EDDC’s largest facility with both a 6-lane 25m swimming pool as well as a teaching pool.

Most of the greenwash is a variation on this theme-

The surplus heat donated by Deep Green’s unit will reduce the pool’s gas requirements by 62 percent

With gas, heat and energy being used almost interchangeably. What I haven't been able to find is how the deal is structured, ie who pays for Deep Green's electricity? Them, or the leisure centre?

[John Robson]

Re: The lawyers of thermodynamics would like a look at the contract.

I would expect that it's the data centre that pays for their power - even if that power is actually purchased from the leisure centre rather than the grid directly.

Now if they didn't purchase that electricity efficiently, or if they fixed only one half of that purchase/supply contract, then that could leave the leisure centre in difficulty given recent price rises in fossil fuel supplies.

Of course your article is about 11 months old, since it refers to Friday Feb 24th (must 2023) in the (recent) past tense.

It probably therefore is about coincident with the installation of this system - and indeed it says as much:

"To reduce its energy costs and carbon footprint LED has installed ... a new state-of-the-art heat recovery system that is due to be commissioned imminently."

[Jellied Eel]

Re: The lawyers of thermodynamics would like a look at the contract.

Now if they didn't purchase that electricity efficiently, or if they fixed only one half of that purchase/supply contract, then that could leave the leisure centre in difficulty given recent price rises in fossil fuel supplies.

That's why I'm curious. I've found some articles that suggest the leisure centre provides the electricity, and gets the heat in exchange. So like you say, seems a bit of an arbitrage risk between the cost of electicity and gas. I'm looking through LED Community Leisure Limited's annual report at the moment, but the latest is from Feb last year. As Octupus has it's tentacles in this, there's probably a lot more complexity involved with stuff like renewable heat incentives and other subsidies.

[John Robson]

Re: The lawyers of thermodynamics would like a look at the contract.

I doubt that they'll be paying for the electricity, unless they made a serious mistake and sold a fixed rate contract without buying a fixed rate supply contract.

[Jellied Eel]

Re: The lawyers of thermodynamics would like a look at the contract.

I doubt that they'll be paying for the electricity, unless they made a serious mistake and sold a fixed rate contract without buying a fixed rate supply contract.

These are council services, and councils are busy dropping like flies, thanks to their 'investments'. Many of which have been in assorted Green and 'renewable' schemes. Again why I'm curious. From discussions on the previous district heating idea linked in the article, people pointed out some of the problems. So servers generally don't run @500C, so heat pumps needed to turn low grade heat into something more useful. Which generally means lots of electricity needed, which could get expensive if the pool is paying for that. So how well it will be able to keep an olympic sized swimming pool heated to 30C using only a few servers, or racks full of servers.

[John Robson]

Re: The lawyers of thermodynamics would like a look at the contract.

"These are council services, and councils are busy dropping like flies, thanks to their 'investments'" chronic underfunding from central government. FTFY

"LED Community Leisure Ltd (LED) is a not-for-profit charitable trust" - i.e. not the council directly.

District heating can use low grade heat, though it's better with slightly higher grade... but again - if you can run your heat pump using the output of a data centre then that's easily scavengable heat to convert into medium grade heat - i.e. a substantial cost saving operationally.

[Jellied Eel]

Re: The lawyers of thermodynamics would like a look at the contract.

if you can run your heat pump using the output of a data centre then that's easily scavengable heat to convert into medium grade heat - i.e. a substantial cost saving operationally.

It's been £20k for over a year now! I'm fairly certain energy has been rather more volatile, but this is Greenwash. I did find this, however-

https://www.linx.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/LINX119-TransformingSocietiesDataCentreHeat-MarkBjornsgaard.pdf

And old sales pitch to the LINX. Also wondering if Octopus was the inspiration for SPECTRE, or vice-versa? Especially given-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Green_Resistance

In the 2011 book Deep Green Resistance, the authors Lierre Keith, Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay state that civilization, particularly industrial civilization, is fundamentally unsustainable and must be actively and urgently dismantled in order to secure a future for all species on the planet

and

https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/officers/fkm2qr3int_F9qrDBe-LRZP3sUA/appointments

Which is not so much the person, more the challenge in unravelling just what Octopus is up to.

[cyberdemon]

Re: The lawyers of thermodynamics would like a look at the contract.

> if you can run your heat pump using the output of a data centre then that's easily scavengable heat to convert into medium grade heat - i.e. a substantial cost saving operationally.

Err, no.

You can't even use a "geothermal source" with a heat-pump to produce economically-viable heat for a swimming pool, apparently!

https://www.energylivenews.com/2024/01/15/geothermal-lido-shuts-for-winter-due-to-high-energy-costs/

Electricity is fucking expensive in the UK, because there are so many snouts in the trough i.e. special markets for subsidising various well-connected people. So much so that a "geothermal pool" (glorified GSHP) isn't very cheap to run.

[John Robson]

Re: The lawyers of thermodynamics would like a look at the contract.

Since I actually know something about that system... the issue is that they couldn't drill nearly as far as they wanted, so they are scavenging from a far smaller loop, at lower temperature than was expected.

Aiming to keep an open air pool at 30-35 degrees is also just crazy hot.

Electricity is fairly expensive, mostly because the market is set up to make sure that burning gas remains the determination of cost - we'll get away from it soon - but it doesn't matter what the cost is if your visitor numbers drop substantially...

[Jellied Eel]

Re: The lawyers of thermodynamics would like a look at the contract.

Electricity is fairly expensive, mostly because the market is set up to make sure that burning gas remains the determination of cost - we'll get away from it soon

Err, nope. Burning wind remains the determination of cost. The market was rigged to based that on the highest cost generation, not the cheapest. And it doesn't look like we're going to get away from that any time soon-

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/hydrogen-production-business-model-net-zero-hydrogen-fund-shortlisted-projects/hydrogen-production-business-model-net-zero-hydrogen-fund-har1-successful-projects

Following the launch of the first hydrogen allocation round (HAR1) in July 2022, we have selected the successful projects to be offered contracts. We are pleased to announce 11 successful projects, totalling 125MW capacity.

The 11 projects have been agreed at a weighted average [footnote 1] strike price of £241/MWh (£175/MWh in 2012 prices). This compares well to the strike prices of other nascent technologies such as floating offshore wind and tidal stream.

Being a government press release, words don't mean what the usually mean. Like 'sucess' and 'compares well', especially when gas is only £34/MWh. So 'Green' Hydrogen is only 7x more expensive than CH4, less energy dense, and relies on cheap/reliable energy to produce it.

But this is why I question the spin in this article. It allegedly 'saves' £20k a year, and that number has remained strangely constant. If that 'saving' was when gas prices peaked following our self-sanctioning, they've fallen again now. This is kind of basic BS/due diligence stuff.

[notyetanotherid]

Re: The lawyers of thermodynamics would like a look at the contract.

> Err, nope. Burning wind remains the determination of cost.

Electricity prices dictated by gas producers who provide less than half of UK electricity

[John Robson]

Re: The lawyers of thermodynamics would like a look at the contract.

"It allegedly 'saves' £20k a year, and that number has remained strangely constant."

Two possibilities:

- The model is the only thing they can possibly quote, and they don't remodel each time the costs change.

- The contract is "cost -£20k"

[jmch]

Re: The lawyers of thermodynamics would like a look at the contract.

"The lawyers of thermodynamics would like a look at the contract"

The laws of thermodynamics don't need lawyers, they will take their tax anyway. But it seems trivially true that with an operation requiring cooling and an operation requiring heating transferring heat from one to the other, that whatever losses there are in the process, it is still more efficient than each of them doing their heating / cooling independently.

"What I haven't been able to find is how the deal is structured, ie who pays for Deep Green's electricity? Them, or the leisure centre?"

Whatever the contract details, since partnering together means lower energy requirements for both operations combined, there is scope for both to benefit. In any case I assume that "save the site more than £20,000 ($25,430) a year on heating bills" is a net figure (although it would be certainly in keeping with UK government projects in general if the private company were getting all the benefits of the arrangement to themselves).

[jmch]

Win-win

"The idea is that a site hosting the datacenter kit gets free heating generated by Deep Green’s servers processing data, which in turn get free cooling."

Seems like a perfectly good win-win for both parties

[cyberdemon]

"Size of a Fridge"

From another couple of articles on the subject: https://www.energylivenews.com/2024/01/15/octopus-dives-into-data-heat/ and https://www.businessgreen.com/news/4163570/octopus-energy-invest-gbp200m-waste-heat-innovator-deep-green (paywalled, but has picture)

It would appear that this is not really a datacentre, but a small cluster of GPUs submerged in mineral oil in a "fridge-sized" unit, presumably with swimming-pool water pipes running through the oil.

To heat the pool to 30C the oil would need to be quite warm.. Somewhere in the region of 60C, i.e. die temperatures of 80C or above. (just a rough guess on those figures)

So it could work, but it sounds quite expensive for a swimming pool heater. Hard to keep it secure, too. Wouldn't be surprised if someone cracked it open with a crowbar and ran off with a couple of (oil-soaked) £20k high-end GPUs

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Green Credentials

Perhaps Rishy Sunak would like to showcase his impeccable green credentials by inviting Deep Green to heat his swimming pool over in his constituency home in the north of England

[Kernel]

This is probably a more productive approach to heating pools with waste heat

It would be nice to know how this is working out, 7 years down the track.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hereford-worcester-23104502