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£200m investment from Octopus in pioneering tech to heat swimming pools with datacentre energy

Pools like this up and down the country could benefit from reduced energy costs

Image:

Pools like this up and down the country could benefit from reduced energy costs

Significant financial backing will help Deep Green install datacentres in up to 150 leisure centres across the UK and potentially heat homes via district heat networks

Octopus Energy's generation arm has announced a £200 million investment in London-based tech disruptor Deep Green to help it rapidly scale its groundbreaking technology across the UK.

The innovative approach pioneered by Deep Green is put small ‘metro' datacentres in buildings which have consistent heat requirements - swimming pools being the ideal example - and use immersive cooling to transfer unwanted heat from servers into very much needed heat for the building.

Computing covered the pilot last March whereby a leisure centre in Devon was able to cut its pool heating bill by 62%. This saved more than £20,000 per year and reduced carbon emissions by nearly 26 tonnes. There are also carbon savings for Deep Green customers to consider.

Installed on-site, Deep Green datacentres in swimming pools don't require additional grid upgrades or planning permission so they can be up and running in a matter of weeks. It isn't quite as quick as whistling up infrastructure in a hyperscaler, but the free cooling which Deep Green gets from the metro datacentre model provides it with a certain competitive edge over offerings based on the usual datacentre model because it can offer affordable, highly energy-efficient computing. Customers include York University, and the company has signed partnerships with industry suppliers Civo and Alces Flight who offer the servers to their customers.

The investment is made via Octopus' dedicated Octopus Energy Transition Fund (OETF) and the Sky (ORI SCSp) fund it manages. OETF launched in 2023 to scale companies in fast-growing sectors decarbonising society, from heating, to storage, low carbon transport and more. Octopus has also backed ground-source heat pump company Kensa Group through this fund.

Zoisa North-Bond, CEO of Octopus Energy Generation said: "To tackle the energy crisis head-on, we need innovative solutions to unusual problems. By using excess heat from data centres to slash energy bills for communities across the UK, Deep Green solves two problems with one solution. We're looking forward to rapidly rolling this out and positively impacting even more people as we drive towards a cleaner, cheaper energy future."

Stating the obvious

Speaking to Computing last year, Mark Bjornsgaard, Founder and CEO of Deep Green emphasised the scalability and replicability of the Deep Green datacentre model.

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Mark Bjornsgaard, CEO Deep Green

"This isn't some mad technology that's going to take ten years to scale. It's built on fungible technology. Immersion cooling is very well understood and the heat exchanger was developed a hundred years ago. It's not space lasers."

"Computers are brilliant heaters. They convert 97% of the electricity used to power them into heat. I think we can all agree on the principles of heat reuse."

The logic is impeccable but the datacentre industry isn't strong on heat reuse. AWS and Microsoft are both conducting a great deal of research into innovative ways to cool their datacentres with less energy and less water, and AWS have also set up some local projects for heat reuse in Dublin. However, these projects are the exception to the rule of datacentres expending huge amounts of energy dissipating heat. If we were starting from scratch, we wouldn't design the datacentre industry this way - as vast warehouses generating heat that gets wasted, and worse, requires more energy to remove.

Deep Green claims that with just 1% of the UK's current datacentre demand run on servers like theirs, they could heat every pool in the country. As AI, machine learning, video rendering and other cloud applications increase the need for computing and therefore the amount of heat being generated, it makes far more sense to deploy computing into fabric of our societies and keep them warm at the same time. Indeed, it seems positively wasteful to do it any other way.

Mark Bjornsgaard added: "We are thrilled with Octopus's commitment to support our next phase of growth. Placing data centres within the fabric of society transforms the waste heat they produce into a valuable resource that benefits communities.

"The data centre sector is rightly facing scrutiny about its growing energy demand and associated carbon emissions. Our data centres are highly energy efficient and support local communities with free heat."

£200m investment from Octopus in pioneering tech to heat swimming pools with datacentre energy

Significant financial backing will help Deep Green install datacentres in up to 150 leisure centres across the UK and potentially heat homes via district heat networks

Stating the obvious

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