Rob Thornton is President and CEO of the International District Energy Association (IDEA). He has spent more than four decades working in one of the energy sector’s most overlooked areas: recovering and reusing heat that would otherwise go to waste.

Much of that opportunity now lies in data centers, which consume huge amounts of electricity and convert almost all of it into heat. Rather than simply rejecting that energy through cooling systems, district energy networks can capture it, upgrade it with heat pumps where needed, and distribute it to nearby homes, offices, hospitals, and campuses.

On the surface, the concept is simple, but as you are about to find out, this is far from the truth. Let’s find out why.

Interesting Engineering: With electricity demand rising rapidly (driven partly by data centers), why has the vast amount of heat they produce become such an important energy and infrastructure issue now?

Rob Thornton: Every kilowatt a data center draws from the grid eventually turns into heat. Servers, power supplies, and cooling equipment have always functioned this way, converting electricity into work and then rejecting nearly all of it as waste heat, continuously.

For years, that heat was treated purely as a disposal problem and cost center—something to reject through a cooling tower as cheaply as possible. What’s changed is the scale and pace of data center deployment, along with growing recognition of thermal energy’s value.  

S. S. electricity in 2023, a share that could rise to as much as 12 percent by 2028 as AI workloads expand.

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