Heat recovery in data centers

As much as 40% of the energy used by an air-cooled data center is dedicated to cooling the servers. Inefficient cooling results in higher operational costs, a larger carbon footprint, and greater environmental impact. Recovering and reusing waste heat can significantly offset these costs, making your data center more efficient and sustainable.

Save heat, save cost

SWEP BPHEs are one of the most efficient means of recovering waste heat from liquid cooling systems, which can then be used for district heating, process heating, or a wide range of other applications. Using a SWEP BPHE, a heat recovery function can be integrated directly into the cooling system, resulting in significant energy, cost, and carbon emission savings.

More about our BPHE

Save heat save cost in data center cooling

How do we measure sustainability?

At SWEP, sustainability is more than a catchphrase. It is a set of carefully measured parameters that contribute to the overall efficiency ratings of your data center. To achieve true sustainability, data centers must achieve excellent performance across four core metrics:

PUE – Power Usage Effectiveness
CUE – Carbon Usage Effectiveness
WUE – Water Usage Effectiveness
ERE – Energy Reuse Effectiveness

Achieving ERE

While PUE, CUE, and even WUE have been key goals within the data center industry for several years, ERE can only be achieved by centers that upgrade their systems to enable waste heat to be captured and reused. Data centers that have reached an ERE of “0” are able to become energy suppliers, rather than just consumers, significantly increasing their overall profitability.

Solving the challenge of heat recovery

Challenges to recycling heat from date centers do remain. Heat for industrial applications or residential or district networks often requires a higher temperature than the cooling water generated by data centers. A SWEP BPHE can extract the heat from the water warmed by cooling the servers, which is already contained in the piping system. A heat pump can be used to raise this temperature to the requirements of its destined application.