Almost every watt a data center uses ends up as heat, and most of that heat is simply thrown away, often with a lot of water used to get rid of it. A report from ReImagine Appalachia asks a practical question for a region where data centers keep turning up on rural land: could that leftover heat warm a greenhouse, a fire hall or a factory instead?
Catching Heat, written by Deborah D. Stine, PhD, for ReImagine Appalachia, looks at how data center waste heat could be captured and reused in Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. The best fits are users within a few miles: district heating networks for public buildings, greenhouses, food processors, manufacturers and water treatment. Done right, heat reuse can cut fossil fuel heating, lower operating costs and reduce the water spent on cooling. The catch is cost and planning. Retrofits are far more expensive than designing for heat reuse from the start, so the report urges states and communities to tie data center approvals to real community benefits up front.
Where the heat could go
The report splits the options into two camps. Community uses include district heating, where warm water runs through insulated pipes to nearby buildings like police and fire stations, schools, pools, or a greenhouse growing fresh food for a town that lacks a grocery store. Industrial uses pair a data center with a neighbor that needs steady low grade heat: food and beverage processing, chemical and materials plants, biotech, and water and wastewater treatment.
Some of this is already being tried close to home. In Marietta, Ohio, SAIHEAT is demonstrating greenhouse heating with heat from liquid cooled computing. In Pennsylvania, Gneuton is using data center waste heat to purify water through thermal distillation. In Mason County, West Virginia, the proposed Monarch Cloud Campus has pitched sending waste heat to adjacent greenhouses.
The report’s estimate of how many Ohio homes a single 24 megawatt data center could, in principle, help heat through the winter, if the pipes existed to reach them.
The honest part
That number comes with a big “if.” Low temperature heat does not travel well. Hot water networks work best over just a few miles, lose heat along the way, and get expensive fast as the pipes get longer. The heat often needs a boost from heat pumps before it is useful. And somebody has to commit to buying it for years, which is a hard sell in rural places without an anchor customer like a hospital, campus or plant. The report is clear that heat reuse is not automatic and will not make sense everywhere.
“Public policy has to steer where and how these projects plug into the local economy.”
Deborah Stine, PhD, report author, ReImagine Appalachia
Why it matters for the rest of us
For watershed groups, the water angle is the one to watch. Data centers that dump heat through evaporative cooling towers draw heavily on local streams and aquifers, and H2O has already covered proposals asking for millions of gallons a day from basin rivers. Capturing that heat instead of evaporating it away is one of the few options on the table that helps the data center, the neighbors and the river at the same time. The report’s policy menu, from feasibility grants to permitting that rewards heat reuse, gives local officials something concrete to ask for before the ground is broken rather than after. A data center that heats the town greenhouse makes a better neighbor than one that just hums.
This article is based on Catching Heat: Using Waste Heat Generated from Data Centers, by Deborah D. Stine, PhD, published by ReImagine Appalachia in February 2026, and the organization’s announcement of the report. Current as of October 22, 2026.
