The world’s largest particle accelerator now has an important new mission: heating thousands of homes. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN has begun to funnel the waste heat from its cooling system to a new residential and commercial area in the nearby French town of Ferney-Voltaire, with the new linkup expected to be able to heat several thousand homes at once.
It’s not really the same thing today as it was 15 years ago. It also hasn’t been running continuously that whole time. They regularly stop experimenting to build new extensions onto it.
I visited the LHC back in 2019 and at the time they were expanding it even then.
I doubt you can answer but did it just become economically viable?
I’d bet it was viable earlier and someone just figured this out.
Makes me wonder recycling the heat from AI data centers.
I’d say the govts should make it mandatory for anyone making a large enough data centre, to create a heat transfer infrastructure to nearby localities. The locals can then buy hot water (metered) via pipelines from the local govt and that can go towards paying for the power extension tax that the data centre has to pay.
Oh yes, there needs to be a power extension tax first, which is levied on anyone setting up data centres to use for wasteful stuff like AI, Crypto-mining etc. Of course, that only matters if they are taking power from the grid and/or building near populated areas (any amount of population).
Datacenter heat is actually a very good source for local heating networks and a lot of European countries either already mandate to consider it when feasible, have introduced legislation that will make it mandatory over the next years or are at least supporting it financially.
It’s actually fairly common to do so for a long time here - from waste incineration, steel mils, nuclear plants, etc.
Personally I heat my office from my server rack and my old job did heat one of their office buildings from the heat generated by the data center in the basement. (And funny enough also did partially cool it from that source)