Edinbrugh trial to warm homes using waste supercomputer heat and old mines
In Edinburgh, a pioneering initiative is underway to evaluate the feasibility of using waste heat from a large computing facility can be stored in disused mine workings and used to warm homes.
The large amounts of energy needed to power the University of Edinburgh’s Advanced Computing Facility (ACF) could be recycled to heat at least 5,000 households in Scotland’s capital.
The facility, home to the national supercomputer and used for research such as national climate modelling and health data modelling, currently releases up to 70 GWh of excess heat per year.
This is projected to rise to 272 GWh once the UK Government’s recently announced next-generation Exascale supercomputer is installed at the University.
The £2.6 million feasibility study will examine how the water in old mine workings near the computing facility could be harnessed to heat people’s homes.
The process of cooling the supercomputers would be augmented to transfer the captured heat into the mine water – up to a maximum temperature of 40°C – which would then be transported by natural groundwater flow in the mine workings, and made available to warm people’s homes via heat pump technology.
If successful, the study could provide a global blueprint for converting abandoned flooded coal, shale and mineral mine networks into underground heat storage.
With a quarter of UK homes sitting above former mines, potentially seven million households could have their heating needs met this way, researchers say.
The Edinburgh Geobattery project – led by Edinburgh-based geothermal company TownRock Energy – is being spearheaded by industry and academic partners from Scotland, the US and Ireland.
The University of Edinburgh is the lead research partner on the project and is providing £500k of funding as part of its own net zero objectives.
Scottish Enterprise has awarded a £1 million grant to the project through the Joint Programming Platform Smart Energy Systems (JPP SES) and Geothermica – two networks that have co-funded projects developing innovative heat and cooling solutions.
A further US $1m from the US Department of Energy will fund researchers from the Idaho National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
University College Dublin, whose researchers are funded by Geothermica and the Geological Survey Ireland, and the University of Strathclyde are also project partners.
Edinburgh Innovations, the University of Edinburgh’s commercialisation service, will help make the research findings an investable proposition and support further funding applications.