How a mini data centre could solve two critical challenges facing the UK

The UK government wants to lift a million more households out of fuel poverty by 2030, but with energy prices set to rise again can anything be done to stop more people entering fuel poverty, let alone lifting them out? A StepChange survey, published in April, found that 45% of the adults in the UK are now concerned about paying their energy bills.

And every week, there are articles about the development of energy-hungry data centres, their impact on the grid and the need for new power generation – renewables and gas – to be built in order to meet their energy demand. It is estimated that data centres consume about 2.5% of the UK’s electricity, and as more are built, their power demand could rise fourfold by 2030.

This is where Thermify comes in. What if a data centre could directly provide heat and hot water for homes instead of expelling waste heat into the atmosphere? Over the past five years, we have been developing a HeatHub energy system to do just that.

HeatHub is a ‘distributed data centre’ and an affordable heating system in a single unit, installed in a home. HeatHub offers cloud compute services to businesses, and heat and hot water to households with the cost of the electricity largely covered by its cloud customers. It means that Thermify can offer low-to-no-cost heating to homeowners and so help to reduce fuel poverty, whilst replacing conventional gas boilers that are to be phased out over the next 20 years.

How? The electricity that is used to power the data processing units is used twice and is paid for by Thermify, as it generates revenue from the cloud computing use.

Our HeatHub is proven and tested. Last year, we successfully participated in a trail project funded by OFGEM, the energy regulator, and supported by UKRI, the government’s research and innovation agency, and the UKPN energy distribution company. We installed our technology in a garden shed and the household saw its energy bills drop from £375 a month to as low as £40, as they swapped their conventional gas boiler for a HeatHub, containing more than 500 Raspberry Pi data processors.

Within the next 12 months, we aim to install more HeatHubs in homes across England and Scotland on our path towards full-scale manufacture and commercial roll-out. New investment will accelerate technology development and the growth of our business.

We will offer a mass-market solution that works as a drop-in replacement for a domestic gas boiler in energy efficient homes, fulfilling the criteria of the government’s Future Homes Standard and its Warm Homes Plan where the replacement of gas boilers with clean types of heating is an important element.

The social housing sector could be a main market for the heating and hot water that HeatHub offers, whilst companies of any size can use the cloud compute solutions that HeatHub also offers. These services will be comparably priced without the environmental impact of conventional data centres.

We believe our technology could potentially solve two critical challenges that face this country: the never-ending rise in household energy prices and the environmental impact of data centres that are needed to meet the growing demand from people’s use of the internet and AI.