The fastest-growing electricity load in the country — cooling alone can be up to 80% of non-compute power draw, and liquid cooling is finally making that heat recoverable.
Nearly every kilowatt-hour a data center draws eventually becomes heat. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory puts U.S. data-center electricity use at 176 TWh in 2023, with a 2030 reference case as high as 649 TWh. Cooling alone can account for up to 80% of everything beyond the compute load itself. As liquid and two-phase cooling push exit temperatures above 122°F, that heat stops being waste and becomes recoverable.
| Planning basis | Reference value | What it implies |
|---|---|---|
| U.S. market scale | 176 TWh of data-center electricity in 2023 (LBNL), trending toward a 2030 reference case near 649 TWh | A genuinely national-scale thermal resource, not a niche application. |
| Cooling share of load | Industry-average PUE ~1.4; cooling reaching up to 80% of non-compute load, and 33–40% of total site electricity at some facilities (DOE) | Cooling electricity is the single largest controllable value stream in most sites. |
| Heat quality | Advanced liquid and two-phase cooling raises exit temperatures above 122°F (50°C) | This is the same threshold TESS is built to capture across every Sidel CREN application. |
| Water exposure | Evaporative cooling towers remain common at scale | Sites in water-stressed or permitting-sensitive regions carry real water-reduction upside. |
| Waste area | How the waste happens today | Technology response |
|---|---|---|
| Chiller & cooling-tower load | Compressor work, tower fan/pump duty and dry-cooler operation run continuously to reject heat the moment it's produced. | TESS intercepts heat before final rejection, buffering it and cutting chiller/tower run time. |
| Evaporative water use | Cooling towers consume significant makeup water, especially in warm or dry climates. | Time-shifting and reducing tower duty lowers evaporative water demand directly. |
| Power-envelope limits | Sites with constrained grid interconnection can't add compute even when cooling capacity nominally allows it. | Every MW of cooling load avoided can be reassigned to revenue-generating compute within the same interconnection. |
| Outage & resilience risk | Backup relies on diesel generation and battery UPS alone. | TESS thermal storage can support black-start and critical-load backup functions where engineered for that duty. |
| Stranded low-grade heat | Liquid-loop return heat above 122°F is rejected rather than reused or converted. | Where temperature and site conditions support it, TESS + ORC converts a portion to behind-the-meter power. |
Best fit: AI/HPC campuses running direct-to-chip or immersion cooling with return temperatures approaching or exceeding 122°F, especially where interconnection, water, or electricity cost is a binding constraint. Start with an instrumentation audit — liquid-loop temperatures and flow, chiller/tower kW, IT load, and water balance — then a 1–2 unit pilot to measure actual cooling-kWh displacement, water displacement and net output before any site-wide commitment.
A conversation with Dr. Stephane Bilodeau, inventor of Novacab TESS, and Michael Logan, President & Chairman of Sidel CREN, on applying waste heat recovery to data center cooling loops.
We would rather send you a data request than a brochure. This is what turns a conversation into a bankable project.
Liquid-loop supply/return temperature and flow; PUE components and IT load; chiller, tower, pump and fan kW; cooling architecture (air, liquid, immersion); makeup water and blowdown; electricity tariff and demand charges; interconnection headroom; SLA and redundancy requirements.
All claims relating to site savings, water reduction, output increase, emissions outcomes, payback, incentives and deployment economics are planning assumptions, analogues or prior-project references — unless and until they are validated for your specific facility through engineering, measurement, vendor quotation, financing documentation, legal review and final commercial agreements.