Some industries use a lot of energy to heat cold water for use in various processes.
Some industries reject heat as a by product of their operations. One of these is the server farm. A server farm consumes a lot of electrical power and generates enormous amounts of heat. This is typically 'rejected' to the atmosphere by large coolers (basically radiators: a coil with a fan).
Quebec is an ideal place for server farms. Lot's of relatively cheap electricity and very high speed optical networks.
Further Quebec has many industries that heat water for use in many processes.
As a means to getting more out of our electricity (freeing up more to be sold to the US, for example), we should co-locate server-farms with industries that take in cold water and then heat it for use in their processes.
In this way the enormous heat generated by a server farm could be used to pre-heat the cold water for the co-located industry. This would reduce the energy consumption of that industry while providing a heat sink for the server farm.
The server farm would charge the industry for that heat, say 2 cents per kWh. This is much cheaper than what the industry is paying for the same amount of heat (whether electric or natural gas). In turn, less 'new' energy is consumed, costs are less and the carbon footprint is reduced for both companies.
As an example, a 1000 server farm consumes about 500,000 W for annual cost of about $175,000. That same 500 kW can be sold as heat to the adjacent industry at, for example, 2c / kWh. That would be a return of about $87,000 per year.
Further, the need for air conditioning would be avoided - in effect the cool water used by the adjacent industry would be the air conditioning for the server farm.
Don't junk heat - recycle it.
