NEW YORK, Dec 13 — What do washing the dishes and uploading pictures to Facebook have in common?
In most places, not much. But in Paris, they both could help heat your local swimming pool.
To keep its bathers from shivering and its energy bills from ballooning, the city has developed some clever ways to reuse excess heat from two unconventional sources, computer servers and sewage.
The wastewater from sinks, toilets, washing machines and so on pours into the Paris sewer system at an average temperature of 55 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit (12 to 20°C). At the Aspirant Dunand swimming pool in the 14th Arrondissement of Paris, the stuff runs through pipes underneath the pool, where the warmth is captured with the help of metal plates in the sewage pipes. A heat-pump system then transfers it to the pool water.
The heat source at a swimming pool in the Butte aux Cailles neighbourhood of the 13th Arrondissement will have to be kept much drier. A French startup company called Stimergy is scheduled to install several hundred computer servers in the building’s basement over the next year. The heat thrown off by the servers will go to the boiler that heats water for the pool and locker-room showers — a “data furnace”, if you will.
Jean-François Martins, the city’s deputy mayor in charge of sports, has said it is all part of a plan to make the city’s swimming pools more “eco-responsible” in preparation for the 2024 Olympic Games, which Paris is in the running to host. (Los Angeles and Budapest, Hungary, are the other contenders.)
“We wish to reduce the environmental impact and ecological footprint of these facilities, while reducing chemical product use,” Martins said of the swimming pools.
Making Paris more environmentally friendly is also high on the to-do list for Mayor Anne Hidalgo, a Socialist. To cut down on tailpipe emissions, her administration recently imposed a much-debated ban on vehicle traffic along a large section of the roadway that runs along the Seine. — The New York Times
