Valorisation de la chaleur rejetée par un centre de données à l’aide d’une boucle énergétique

Abstract

Data centers are necessary to process information from the growing digital activities. Therefore, an important increase in electricity consumption is anticipated. Since the majority of the electricity is converted into heat, recovering this energy is important to reduce environmental impact and is especially interesting in cold climates like Québec. However, this recovery is complex because the waste heat is at low temperature. The main objective is to utilize the heat generated by high power servers belonging to Calcul Québec in order to reduce the environmental impact of the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems at École de Technologie Supérieure (ÉTS). ÉTS is served in part by an urban cooling network which transports not only waste heat from Calcul Québec, but also other heat rejection loads from the campus. Using heat pumps, energy can be extracted from the return of the cooling network. Thus, the cooling network is called a district energy loop since it allows buildings to share heat. The buildings part of the district energy loop were selected to promote synergy. This selection was based on mapping the energy systems of the university. Existing buildings A, B and D, which houses Calcul Québec, as well as future buildings F and the Complexe Dow were selected. Afterwards, the energy recovery potential from the HVAC systems of selected buildings was evaluated. The evolution of the thermal power over time (energy profiles) was conducted based on recorded data for the existing buildings and simulation data from the future buildings. With the exception of building D, which has the data center, the Complexe Dow is the building that transfers and extracts the most energy from the district energy loop. The energy feasibility of the district energy loop was demonstrated. For the future buildings, the electrical costs of the heat pumps served by the district energy loop and their operational carbon costs were compared to those of a conventional heating design. According to this analysis, these operational costs of district energy loop is five times lower than conventional heating. Given these results, it would be interesting to continue the study of the energy loop by considering, for example, thermal inertia and the installation costs of the heat pumps.

Date	17 Dec 2024
Original language	French
Awarding Institution	École de technologie supérieure
Supervisor	Didier Haillot (Supervisor) & Stanislaw Kajl (Co-supervisor)