Evaluation of Economic Benefits and Greenhouse Gas Emissions of Data Center Waste Heat for the Use of District Heating

Abstract

As carbon neutrality emerges as a global challenge, the government announced the “Data Dam” as one of the ten major projects of the Korean New Deal. Accordingly, the number of data centers and the amount of power usage for equipment operation are expected to increase due to the acceleration of the data economy. In this study, the costs of existing heating systems and district heating systems using data center waste heat are compared according to the life cycle cost analysis using the payback period method. However, the payback period method has difficulty reflecting future value, so the value was complemented using the present value method. When the data center waste heat is used as district heating, assuming that the energy cost is frozen (scenario 1), the benefit is about KRW 4 billion for 1,000 households, and the investment cost recovery takes 18 years. On the other hand, if the energy cost goes up by 5% every five years from the start of the project (scenario 2), the resulting energy savings is about KRW 30 billion, and the time to recoup the initial investment is shortened by eight years. The study calculated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions according to energy consumption for each scenario in accordance with the 2006 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Guidelines. The results are 14.9 tCO₂-eq for scenario 1 and 0.006 tCO₂-eq for scenario 2 (a reduction of more than 99% in GHG emissions compared to scenario 1).