A University of Maryland professor won a first-of-its-kind pitch competition for a new way to deal with heat generated by data centers.
“I saw this program, and I started reading about community concerns around energy, and I thought about the potential of a two-pronged process.”
Damena Agonafer, University of Maryland
Damena Agonafer developed his approach via the Vicinity Ideation Program, a partnership between Boston-based Vicinity Energy and the Maryland Energy Innovation Accelerator to spur new approaches to clean heating and urban decarbonization. At its culminating event on Friday, Agonafer took the top prize for his tech that captures waste heat from data centers and redirects it to warm local communities.
Agonafer worked on data center cooling technologies before the program, but didn’t consider other applications.
“I wasn’t thinking about repurposing the waste heat,” Agonafer said. “But then I saw this program, and I started reading about community concerns around energy, and I thought about the potential of a two-pronged process.”
Vicinity Energy is a Boston-based energy company that provides heating and cooling in cities across the country. Though the competition did not carry a cash prize, Vicinity plans to keep collaborating with Agonafer as his research moves forward, CEO Kevin Hagerty said.
Agonafer’s tech essentially eliminates the need for heat pumps, which are systems that capture the waste heat produced by servers to reuse it. While more efficient than traditional boilers, heat pumps still consume significant energy, particularly in colder climates, where they work harder to boost temperatures from sources like outside air or chilled water loops.
Instead, Agonafer’s system uses a liquid coolant — a heat-absorbing fluid that boils directly on the surface of computer chips — to generate the necessary heat temperatures immediately, which can then be passed to a system like Vicinity’s through a heat exchanger.
Over several months, Vicinity’s technical staff helped Agonafer and other participating teams develop concepts that could be applied across the company’s district energy systems. The initiative helps Vicinity identify emerging technologies early and explore how they could be incorporated into its operations, CEO Kevin Hagerty said.
“As owners of a utility, we can incorporate these new technologies and actually source the kind of capital you need to take these technologies from a pilot to something that’s large,” Hagerty told Technical.ly.
Data center heat as community energy
Agonafer’s research isn’t the first to tackle data center heat recovery, but it said it proposes a less energy-intensive approach to the concept.
In Finland, data centers have utilized heat recovery technology to warm the town of Mäntsälä for nearly a decade. Now, Microsoft is developing a data center campus that could provide heat to roughly 40% of Espoo, the country’s second-largest city, according to Bloomberg.
But Microsoft’s method — and similar projects in other cities — rely on heat pumps to capture low-temperature waste heat from data center hardware and elevate it to levels suitable for district heating.
Agonafer’s team is funded by the US Department of Energy’s ARPA-E COOLERCHIPS program, which supports new cooling technologies for data centers, to work on his alternative tech.
What stood out the most about Agonafer’s tech, according to Hagerty, was the idea of tackling the problem at its source rather than adding the extra layer of heat pumps.
“I was enormously excited when I saw that, rather than trying to solve it on the district energy side,” Hagerty said. “We’re solving it on the data center side.”
