Residential Towers Heated by Data Centers Planned for San Jose
Vancouver-based Westbank is planning at least two projects in downtown San Jose featuring residential towers adjacent to data centers that will generate heat for the homes.
At an Innovation Summit hosted in the city last week by investor-owned utility PG&E, Westbank disclosed that its long-term plan is to create a downtown San Jose “district energy system” that will link a cluster of housing developments paired with data hubs, the San Jose Mercury News reported.
Westbank is planning to include a stand-alone data center at its Orchard Residential development, where it has proposed to build three residential towers, each 30 stories high, encompassing a total of 1,147 units on a site at the corner of South First Street and East San Carlos Street.
The concept also will be deployed at a project known as Terraine, a 17-story residential tower with 345 apartments at 323 Terraine Street.
Westbank is aiming to build more than 4,000 residential units in downtown San Jose, with a heavy focus on the sustainability of those units, Andrew Jacobson, VP of the U.S for Westbank, told the newspaper.
“With multiple data centers and housing clusters, the idea is to connect them all together and create a downtown San Jose district energy system,” Jacobson said. “If we can capture low-cost, low-carbon energy, that creates a huge opportunity downtown.”
San Jose, which has pledged to be carbon neutral by 2030, has launched an Innovative Project Pathway Program to encourage creative mixed-use projects that feature high-density housing.
“Westbank’s proposal is exciting because it tackles two of our biggest challenges in the same project: housing and energy conservation,” San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan told Mercury News. “This can be a net zero energy project through the computing power in the data center, then capturing excess heat to use it to heat the neighboring high-rise developments.”
District heating systems that use excess heat from data centers already are up and running in Europe. In Stockholm, where 90% of the buildings are hooked up to district heating, the city has been connecting the system to dozens of data centers as part of its long-term goal to wean itself off fossil fuels, Fast Company reported.
In Finland, two large new Microsoft data centers will provide an estimated 40% of the heating in three cities. A Google data center will provide 80% of the heat in another Finnish city. Similar projects are planned in Paris, London and Zurich, the report said.
In the Netherlands, a company called Switch Datacenters has mitigated reliance on natural gas by replacing its gas generator units with data-center heating. The system works by using direct liquid cooling to transfer heat away from servers. The excess heated water from this process is then sent to homes.