A2A inaugurates heat recovery data centre with Qarnot

A2A has inaugurated a new data centre in the Lamarmora power station in Brescia, designed by the French company Qarnot. Thanks to an advanced liquid cooling system, it is possible to recover thermal energy at high temperatures, up to 65 °C, to be fed directly into the grid to bring heat to buildings.

The project represents one of the first applications in Italy of heat recovery from data centres, the first in a city network with the innovative liquid cooling technology, and responds to a global energy challenge: harnessing the waste heat of digital infrastructures - constantly expanding and highly energy-intensive - to produce useful thermal energy for cities.

"The rapid spread of data centres and the growing electrification of consumption require major investments in electricity grids to support the increased demand for energy. But it also opens up an extraordinary opportunity for cities equipped with district heating networks: recovering waste heat from servers and transforming it into thermal energy," explained A2A CEO Renato Mazzoncini. "The pilot project with Qarnot that we are inaugurating today is proof that integrating energy recovery into the design of data centres right from the start means creating strategic infrastructures for the future: more competitive cities, more sustainable territories, heat available where it is needed, without the need for fossil fuels.

"Once again, Brescia confirms itself as a city-laboratory, experimenting with increasingly advanced technologies for improving the level of C02 emissions into the atmosphere," added Laura Castelletti, mayor of Brescia: "As was the case with district heating in the 1970s, when Brescia, with Asm, was the first in Italy to make this infrastructure available to citizens, today we are inaugurating a new technology that refines strategies to combat atmospheric pollution and marks a step forward towards the decarbonisation of the city.

"This first project realised in Italy represents a strategic milestone for Qarnot," explained Paul Benoit, CEO and co-founder of Qarnot: "Made possible thanks to our collaboration with A2A, it allows us to respond to the growing demand in the Italian market for high-performance cloud solutions (HPC) that are energy efficient and able to guarantee a high level of technological autonomy. Our infrastructure is particularly suitable for sectors such as automotive, aerospace, energy, maritime and, in general, all simulation-intensive industries: areas that require not only computing power, but also data control and security. Our model allows us to cover the entire HPC cloud value chain, from the design of low-emission infrastructures to the provision of compute-intensive services. By designing data centres capable of generating reusable heat, we combine performance, sustainability and value creation on the ground'.