It is quite amazing the amount of energy we use in our civilization cooling our electronic equipment and keeping from over-heating. Heat as we know is energy, and it makes sense to have our electronic equipment run cooler, faster, and trouble free with as little heat as possible - easier said than done kocuce. Nevertheless, it is a worthy challenge to tackle. Not long ago, I interviewed an inventor and innovator, Jonathan Reed and he indicated he'd like to pursue a course of action which would call for the recycling of all that heat at all the server farms.
In other words, use that heat to create energy, perhaps a geo-thermal energy generating type scheme only on a much smaller scale, perhaps, enough to offset the energy usage at the server farm itself, at least when it comes to the air-conditioning costs involved. In considering all this, well, it's a great concept. It is a real problem and one we need to solve.
Incidentally, have you read about the new Cisco servers coming out - 12 times faster, meaning that the Internet will be saved despite all the new 4G wireless smart phones, video phone use, song downloads, movie downloads, etc. Now, do you know at what temperature these run at? Because a Google warehouse full of them would generate a lot of heat and since they need to be cooled, it makes sense to harness this energy and use it to run the air-conditioning system, at least as efficient as possible.
If and yes, I know "if" is one of the most loaded packed words on planet Earth - okay so, what if one could get to 50-60% efficiency through the converting of this heat energy, it would surely cut energy costs. Is anyone doing this now? It turns out Jonathan Reed agrees; "as the servers produce undesired heat then turning this heat back into electricity the server farm energy costs can be reduced. The process would be a scaled version of a regular power plant. The heat used to increase the pressure of a gas, and the coolant, that server farms employ to cool the servers, would be used to decrease the pressure and keep the flow from high to low pressure constant."
Okay, so this all makes perfect sense and he suggests using a gas such as Argon or CO2 (keeping with all the media advantages of using CO2) because those gases could reach a pressure with the amount of heat generated by the servers. He further suggest; "The extra cost of the gas would not be a problem in the long run as it would be a closed system so no refilling is required."
Well, this too makes sense. It seems so obvious - I'd wonder who is already doing it? Does anyone know if this is being done? The heat could also be used in a Submarine to heat the personnel areas, or in a space colony to heat the human quarters or plants that produce food. If you take the heat away, you have cooler running servers, and use the heat as is - more efficient as there is no loss in conversion.
Indeed, I just bet someone is doing some version of these concepts, and many similar to them, why waste energy? Most engineers think like this, so I am certain they had already considered it. I'd like to see what they came up with to improve upon and get your mind working on it. However, if no one is thinking here, they had better give Jonathan Reed a call and look at his calculations, because this is a hot topic and the need for energy is heating up. Think on this. https://www.kocuce.com.tr/