Octopus Puts its Tentacles into Swimming Pool Energy

The UK utility Octopus Energy has invested £200 million ($254 million) into startup Deep Green, a company using waste heat from its data centers to heat swimming pools.

This is an interesting synergy: data centers generate a lot of heat; many swimming pools currently cannot afford the higher energy costs to run them in the winter. This project would seem to be a virtuous use of excess energy.

Deep Green tested a pilot project in Devon, in the West of England. A town’s public pool was warmed by a compact mobile data center, only the size of a fridge, which efficiently heats this swimming pool by utilizing excess heat generated during data processing.

Mark Bjornsgaard, CEO of Deep Green said, “We built a small data center in Exmouth Leisure Center. Most normal data centers waste the heat that the computers generate. We capture ours and we give it for free to the swimming pool to heat the pool.”

Over 400 swimming pools in England have closed since 2010 and many more are finding it difficult to cope with the hikes in energy prices. According to company estimates, if just 1% of the UK’s data center’s processing energy were tapped into by Deep Green, the potential exists to continuously heat every pool in the country. This of course needs to be qualified, as not many data centers are constructed next to swimming pools.

The project has been the subject of many inquiries from swimming pools wanting to be put on the list for this technology. The funding, from Octopus Energy Transition Fund (OETF), will mean that more data center/swimming pool partnerships can go forward, testing and improving the technology. Harnessing waste energy is a valuable method of reducing emissions and increasing energy efficiency.