Here’s an interesting “tech for good” story, and it isn’t a software engineer volunteering at a nonprofit organization. This is actual physical, hyperscale servers directly contributing something to the environment. It’s a European program that captures heat generated in data centers and warms people’s homes with it.

Hyperscale cloud providers like Amazon Web Services Inc. and Google Cloud Platform are heading up north. They’re setting up data centers in Nordic regions like the Netherlands. They’re cold and cheap; renewable energy is abundant. The problem is these behemoth data centers use a lot of power without giving much back.

“If you look at the growth curve of data centers, you can really see that they will consume more and more power,” said Max Schulze (pictured), adviser at Vattenfall Group and partner at New Bridge Founders. “The power they consume is not compatible with renewable energy.” In fact, these data centers want 100 percent reliable power to run their servers, which tends to come from non-renewable sources — nuclear plants and coal, for instance.

Schulze and his colleagues are working with these hyperscalers on making their data centers more sustainable. One way they are doing that is to cultivate the heat they emit and transfer it into district heating grids.

Schulze spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Seattle, Washington. They discussed efforts to re-purpose heat from hyperscalers’ servers for greater sustainability.

Hot, new cloud service

Most existing data center projects extract heat out of the air, which is quite inefficient, according to Schulze, adding that the use of liquids provides a better solution. Hot water cools servers and flows at very high speed through the data center, increasing in temperature.

“We get out the water at 140 degrees Fahrenheit, and we put it in at 120 degrees Fahrenheit,” he said.

Schulze’s team also uses Kubernetes — an open-source platform for orchestrating containers (a virtualized method for running distributed applications) to steer workloads in the data center.

“A chip only gets hot when the server actually does something,” he said. Kubernetes’ internal scheduler can force workloads to different locations. The team has worked with Red Hat Inc. to connect this to its energy, forecasting, and heat-load management systems.

Data centers are moving closer to cities to enable close connection to the heating grids.

“With a hyperscale data center from Microsoft of 300 megawatts, you can heat about 150,000 homes,” Schulze concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event.

Photo: SiliconANGLE