One point though – This isn’t the first of it’s kind – Check out the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Switzerland.

And where is this located (or did I just miss that)? I know Facebook and Google have been siting their data centers in locations that have year-around temperatures that meet their cooling needs so that they can replace condensers in favor of an open air system whenever possible. Also, Google has been conducting research on how high temperatures in the data center can go before it adversely effects reliability.

Other thing to note – Some companies (Green Revolution comes to mind) have been looking at total oil submersion with heat-induced convection currents to remove the heat from the components. This allows you to use fewer pumps to push the coolant through cooling towers and save even more energy than the above approach with the added benefit of not needing special cooling hardware like the water-blocks and tubing.

As our computing demands grow I don’t see the overall energy consumption for computing decreasing any time soon, but we sure can get a whole lot more computational power out of the same amount of energy!

Also – Using the excess heat to melt the Ice off of walkways/streets is gold.