Case 02 · Live Model

The 130 Megawatt Question

The heat is free, enormous, and too cold to sell at a profit — even with the best available recovery machine, tested against real regional capital cost.

Inputs

Scenario A · $55/MWh industrial tariff, $45/t carbon arrives. Nudge carbon toward $90 for the 2035 case.

Net present value · live

What the decision depends on

Swing in NPV between each variable's tested low and high case. Biggest bar is the assumption that actually decides the answer.
Raised by the organisers

The stated COP of 4.6 and the stated 24 MW cannot both be true

At COP 4.6 with 24 MW of chiller power the cooling load would be 110.4 MW, so the condenser would reject 110.4 + 24 = 134.4 MW against 130.5 MW entering the campus — 3.9 MW more heat than the site receives, with no other heat source. For 4.6 to be possible at all, chiller power must be at most 23.30 MW.

Where the 9 MW of pumps and towers sits changes the answer: pump motor heat enters the fluid it pumps, fan motor heat goes to air. The reconcilable range is 4.06 (tight boundary) to 4.44 (all 9 MW into the loops). Neither reaches 4.6.

Base case runs on the stated 4.6 as directed by the organisers; the alternative runs on the implied COP. We show both rather than asserting either.

Challenged assumption

Chiller COP improves about 2.5% per K of chilled water relief

Industry-standard consensus for centrifugal water-cooled chillers is roughly 1.5–2.0% saved per °F of chilled-water-supply reset, equivalent to about 2.7–3.6% per K — our 2.5%/K assumption sits conservatively inside that band.

BuildingIQ, "HVAC Savings Tip: Chilled Water Supply Temperature Reset." · Eng-Tips professional engineering forum, consensus reply: "1.5% reduction in energy per degree increase in CHWS temp."

Team proposal · heat recovery chiller

This is deployed commercial equipment, not a novel machine

Meta's data centre in Odense, Denmark recovers server waste heat through a heat-recovery system that upgrades it to district-heating temperature, supplying roughly 11,000 homes. A comparable heat-pump-on-chilled-water-return retrofit in Hohhot, China cut the district network's electricity draw by about 10% a year.

Munters Data Center Technologies, case study, 2026. · "Towards a Systematic Survey for Carbon Neutral Data Centers," arXiv:2110.09284.

Challenged assumption

The $22.55M Danish reference cost is regionally unverified

The only public capital benchmarks for data-centre-to-district heat export networks are Danish and use comparable transmission distances (Apple's Viborg facility, 12 km). No Gulf-region installation of this scale and duct type exists yet to confirm the figure, which is exactly why the model tests it hard rather than accepting it.

"Impacts of flexible-cooling and waste-heat recovery from data centres on energy systems: A Danish case study," ScienceDirect, 2023.