BEYOND THE BUZZ
Can data centre waste heat become a viable energy solution for greenhouse horticulture?
By Ron van der Ploeg
The urgency for sustainability is there, and the opportunity is significant. But temperature, distance, societal pressure and economics will determine whether data centre waste heat projects can succeed.
As the environmental impact of data centres and servers explodes, driven by economic expansion and rapid technological advances such as AI, the data centre industry is facing mounting societal and political pressure to improve its environmental credentials. The urgency is not without reason.
The resource challenge
Voracious energy appetite
The International Energy Agency’s (IEA) 2025 Energy and AI report estimates that data centres will account for more than 20 per cent of electricity-demand growth in advanced economies by 2030. Globally, electricity demand from data centres is projected to more than double by 2030 compared with 2024 levels, reaching approximately 945 terawatt-hours (TWh)—slightly more than Japan’s annual electricity consumption at the time of the report. Data centres and data transmission networks were responsible for around one per cent of global energy-related greenhouse gas emissions in 2020, according to research cited by the IEA.
In the Netherlands, society and politicians have long questioned the environmental impact of data centres, magnified by their sheer proliferation. It is well known that data centres consume large amounts of energy and water, but accurate national data on their electricity and water consumption has been limited.
That changed in December 2025, when the Dutch statistics office CBS published mind-boggling figures, showing that data centres consumed 5,100 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of electricity in 2024, equivalent to 4.6 per cent of the Netherlands’ total electricity consumption.
This corresponds to the annual electricity consumption of nearly two million households. According to the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO), one of the country’s largest data centres, operated by Microsoft in Middenmeer, alone consumes one per cent of the Netherlands’ total electricity consumption. Google, meanwhile, has so far declined to share comparable data.
The official statistics show that electricity consumption by data centres is continuing to rise, albeit at a slightly slower pace than previously projected.
To date, the Netherlands has approximately 200 data centres, predominantly located around Amsterdam. They range from compact edge data centres that bring services closer to users to vast hyperscale facilities operated by major technology companies.
CBS stresses that the increase in electricity supplied to data centres is mainly attributable to large facilities consuming more than 10 GWh annually. This group of approximately 45 data centres accounts for around 90 per cent of the total electricity supplied to data centres.
MASSIVE RESOURCE DEMAND
Reflecting on the figures, researcher and data scientist Alex de Vries-Gao at the Institute for Environmental Studies at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) says they are significant, given that this single sector accounts for 4.6 per cent of the Netherlands’ electricity consumption.
In an interview with Dutch media outlet EenVandaag, he said a partially overlooked but fundamental issue is the water footprint of data centres. Data centres use water to cool servers, chips, and network equipment.
CBS calculates that all data centres in the Netherlands combined consume 0.088 per cent of drinking water. Data centres consume about one million cubic metres of water annually, equivalent to around 400 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
The distinction between water withdrawal and water consumption is central to understanding these figures. Withdrawal is the total volume of water a facility draws from a source; some of that water eventually returns to the source. Consumption refers to the portion that is not returned, typically because it evaporates during cooling.
A related distinction is between direct and indirect water use. Direct water use refers to water applied on site, while indirect water use concerns water consumed at power plants generating the electricity used by a data centre.
De Vries-Gao notes that, when the total water footprint of data centres is taken into account, the most significant impact—around 95 per cent—concerns cooling systems used in electricity generation rather than the data centre itself.
Making the heat connection
Turning waste heat into useful heat
As data centres become increasingly important to the global digital economy, the industry is facing growing pressure to improve its environmental performance.
Energy efficiency, renewable power and water consumption have dominated the sustainability conversation for years. Increasingly, however, another opportunity is attracting attention: the reuse of data centre waste heat.
The concept appears straightforward. Data centres generate heat as a by-product of IT operations and cooling processes. Instead of releasing that energy into the atmosphere, why not use it to heat homes, offices, public buildings or greenhouses?
Yet the reality is more complex. Data centre waste heat is not automatically a valuable energy source. Whether a project succeeds depends on a combination of technical, geographical and economic factors.
The first challenge is temperature. Conventional air-cooled data centres typically produce relatively low-temperature heat. In many cases, the available temperature is insufficient for direct use in traditional heating systems.
Homes, commercial buildings and district heating networks may require significantly higher temperatures than those generated by a data centre’s cooling systems. This is where heat pumps play a crucial role.
Heat pumps can upgrade low-temperature waste heat to a level suitable for heating applications. However, the greater the temperature difference between the heat source and the required delivery temperature, the greater the investment and electricity consumption required.
As generative AI adoption escalates, the demand for sophisticated cooling technologies, particularly direct-to-chip liquid cooling, is also increasing. These technologies could change the characteristics of the heat available for recovery in greenhouse horticulture.
How close are the customers?
A data centre may generate a significant amount of recoverable heat, but its value drops rapidly if no suitable customer is nearby.
Pipelines, pumping stations, heat exchangers, heat pumps and distribution networks all require investment. The further the heat has to travel, the more difficult the business case becomes.
A data centre located next to a greenhouse cluster, residential development, university campus, or district heating network may therefore have a fundamentally different opportunity than a facility in an isolated industrial area.
One sector that could benefit significantly from data centre waste heat is greenhouse horticulture.
Greenhouse clusters often have substantial and predictable heating requirements. In regions where horticulture and digital infrastructure are close together, this could create attractive opportunities for energy integration.
Again, temperature remains an important consideration.
Many greenhouse heating systems require temperatures that are higher than those directly available from conventional data centre cooling systems. Heat pumps or other forms of energy upgrading may therefore still be required.
The most promising opportunities are likely to emerge where the entire energy system is designed as an integrated ecosystem.
For example, a data centre could supply low-temperature heat to a greenhouse operation, while the broader energy system could support the cooling requirements of the data centre.
This creates the possibility of a more circular energy model, in which infrastructure is designed around energy exchange rather than one-way resource consumption.
For the next generation of data centres, the question is whether potential heat customers should become part of the site-selection process. Historically, data centre location decisions have focused primarily on renewable power and water availability, connectivity, land prices, risk profiles and access to customers.
In the future, access to heat demand may increasingly become another factor in infrastructure planning.
Building a viable system
Who pays?
Technology is only one part of the equation. The economics of waste heat reuse remain one of the industry’s biggest challenges.
While consumers and horticultural entrepreneurs may focus on the cost of connecting a home, building or greenhouse operation to a heat network, the real investment often lies elsewhere.
A functioning large-scale horticultural heat ecosystem may require expensive heat-extraction infrastructure, long-term operation and maintenance capacity, and sustained collaboration among project participants.
The big question is: who will finance that infrastructure?
Depending on the project, costs may be shared between data centre operators, energy companies, municipalities, infrastructure developers and end users. This is why successful projects require not only good intentions but, more importantly, a clear commercial structure.
Who owns the infrastructure? Who operates it? Who pays for the initial investment? And what happens if the expected demand does not materialise?
Without clear answers to these questions, even technically attractive projects can struggle to move beyond the planning stage and sustainability headlines.
The data centre industry should also be careful with terminology. There is a significant difference between heat that is theoretically available, heat that could potentially be recovered, heat that has been contracted to a customer and heat that is actually being delivered.
A project may announce that its waste heat could theoretically supply thousands of homes. That does not necessarily mean those homes are currently receiving heat from the data centre.
For the industry, credibility will increasingly depend on measurable results. Meaningful indicators are therefore likely to include the temperature of the recovered heat, the annual volume of heat delivered, the number and type of connected customers, the energy required to upgrade the heat, and the overall reduction in carbon emissions.
Moving from potential to performance
The biggest opportunity may lie in changing the way data centres are planned.
Before building a new data centre, developers could ask: Are there potential heat customers nearby? Is there an existing district heating network? Are greenhouse clusters located within a practical distance? What temperatures do potential customers require? Can cooling and heating infrastructure be designed as an integrated system? Is there a long-term commercial agreement that supports investment?
The answers to these questions may influence where and how future data centres are developed.
The next step is to explore how the infrastructure surrounding data centres can benefit from the energy those facilities produce. Waste heat will not be the right solution for every location.
Some data centres will be too far from potential customers. Others will face technical or economic barriers that are hard to overcome.
But where the right conditions exist, the opportunity is significant.
