If we can use heat sources as energy, why not use it to put power back into the system?
In: Technology
Because to produce usefull energy you need something to be a lot hotter than the enviroment for it to be efficient.
The issue is the “Carnot Factor”. The amount of energy you can receive at the maximum is depending on the difference in temperature to the enviroment. The factor is (T_hot-T_cold)/T_hot if you use Kelvin
The means lukewarm server coolwater is rather inefficient and the hardware you need to extract the energy isn’t going to pay itself off in a hundred years.
For comparision a steam powerplant operates at 550K above the outside temperature usually, and reaches about 40% efficiency with that. At 70K (wich would be horribly hot for cooling a server) you could reach at most 20% if you had no losses at all.
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