Spar Systems
Waste heat to electricity.
Power plants usually start by burning some crap. Wood, whale oil, coal. These days they mostly burn euphemistic natural gas. That heats up some water until it becomes steam. The steam expands, creating pressure to push a turbine, which is basically a big fan. The turbine turns a generator, which is essentially an electric motor run backwards and electricity comes out the other end. About 40% of the energy in the heat becomes electricity.
These electrons go down a fat wire to your neighborhood, then a smaller wire to your house, an even smaller wire to your power outlet, and finally a modest wire into your toaster. A toaster is made of a zillion tiny wires that turn those electrons back into heat. About 2/3 of that heat flies through the air into your bagel, and the rest just heats up your kitchen.
A datacenter is a colossal toaster. Currently, about 2% of all the electricity in the world goes into datacenters. Roughly 60% goes through the tiniest wires of all, computer chips. Nearly all of it becomes heat eventually. The rest goes into “cooling” equipment, which ironically, also makes more heat. A datacenter turns 97% of the electricity it consumes into heat.
So why don’t we just use the heat coming out of the datacenter to make more electricity? Well, this heat isn’t very hot, maybe 120°F. The Rankine cycle (eloquently described above) needs 1200°F steam. For a couple hundred years people have fantasized about solving this, but all the inventions still need temperatures over 450°F.
Spar Systems has invented the only efficient way to recover low temperature waste heat. These guys will install a machine at your datacenter, siphon off the heat you are trying to get rid of anyway and turn it into electricity that you can use to power toasters, or, you know, the datacenter. How much? They should be able to reduce your electricity bill by about 25%.
The team is focused on delivering megawatt scale systems next year, and the customer demand is directly proportional to NVIDIA’s market cap. Someday, when they run out of datacenters, the same technology can make shallow geothermal energy practical.