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Startup Looks to Computing to Heat Buildings

Project Exergy hopes to capture waste heat from computers to warm homes and offices.

Henry 2
ProjectExergy.com
Ask any computer user and they’ll all pretty much agree they don’t want their machine running too hot. Whether a desktop, a laptop or a smartphone – users try to keep things cool. The team at Project Exergy believes the opposite. They are working on a supercomputer that runs as hot as possible so that, according to this press release, it can store that heat and apply it to a home’s space, water heating and air conditioning needs.

In other words, almost all appliances and devices today have some sort of computer inside of them. Those computers all generate heat. Project Exergy’s prototype is a centralized computer for the home that also heats the building it resides in.

Lawrence Orsini, the founder of Project Exergy, said that “Project Exergy wants to combine the largest energy consuming end use in our country, heating and cooling, with the fastest growing consumer of energy today, computation. Our goal is to eventually eliminate 2% of US electricity consumption by distributing rapidly growing data center and cloud computation loads to existing buildings. By shifting the energy consumed and heat created in Data Centers today to residential homes, we could displace the heating energy used in approximately ⅔ of single family homes across the U.S.”

Sound intriguing? Sound confusing? Maybe some of both? There are a few videos, such as the one below, at http://projectexergy.com/ that help to somewhat clarify and tantalize. The project is also launching a Kickstarter campaign on February 1. We'll follow this story and report any new developments.