Your new heat source: data centers

The massive data centers that power services from Google, Facebook, IBM and other tech giants are big-time energy hogs. But researchers around the world are starting to turn them into an energy source.

In the United States, data centers are responsible for more than 2% of the country's electricity usage, according to researchers at Villanova University. If the global cloud computing industry were considered to be a single country, it would be the fifth-largest in the world in terms of energy consumption, according to Ed Turkel of Hewlett-Packard's Hyperscale Business Unit. Nearly half of the energy data centers consume goes to cooling the equipment using fans and other methods.

That's "just wasteful," said Jill Simmons, director of Seattle's Office of Sustainability and Environment. That's why the city of Seattle is working on a project to make use of the heat data centers produce. The city plans to route heat from two local data centers to to help warm 10 million square feet of building space in the surrounding area. The project is still in the conceptual phase, but Simmons said the city hopes to have it in motion "within the next year." The plan is to take the water that cools the data center and pipe it out to buildings nearby. The system will also rely on water heated by energy from sewer lines and electrical substations.