
UK Pool Heats Water, Cuts Costs & Emissions with Tiny Data Centre Exmouth, England
Exmouth Leisure Centre in Devon (south west England) has become the first public swimming pool in the UK to benefit from the heat generated by a tiny data centre to reduce its energy costs. Deep Green, a start-up offering computing power for artificial intelligence and machine learning, installed a washing-machine-sized data centre into the community centre, which surrounded the computers with oil to capture the heat. The hot oil is then pumped into a heat exchanger to warm the water in the pool to around 30C (86F) for 60% of the pool’s operating time. This reduces the leisure centre’s gas requirements by 62%, saving an estimated £20,000 a year, and reducing annual carbon emissions by approximately 26 tonnes.