UK district heating firm Hemiko has been selected by the Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation (OPDC), a London Mayoral Development Corporation to design, develop, and operate a low-carbon heat network that will draw waste heat from local data centers.

Hemiko will work with OPDC to develop the network, which is expected to provide heating to more than 9,000 new homes and businesses in the Old Oak and Park Royal area, which spans the London boroughs of Ealing, Brent and Hammersmith & Fulham.

The project will be deployed in a phased approach, with five phases in total between 2028 and 2040. The first phase of the project is expected to deliver upwards of 95GWh of heat every year. To support the project rollout, Hemiko will invest £63 million ($81.3m) in the first phases, growing to £600m ($774.3m) by 2040.

According to the partners, the project is the first in the UK to use waste heat from data center cooling systems.

Commenting on the deal, Toby Heysham, CEO at Hemiko, said: “By taking surplus heat from local data centers, we don’t need to burn gas in the middle of a city to heat people’s homes, with the right infrastructure we can take local waste heat and offer it to local people while offering local jobs at the same time.”

The project is expected to serve the Old Oak and Park Royal regeneration area, which is London’s largest new development project, which plans to build more than 25,000 new homes over the next 20 years.

The project has already received significant funding from the local government. In November 2023, OPDC secured £36m ($46.4m) from the Government’s Green Heat Network Fund. Funding has also been provided by the Mayor of London’s Local Energy Accelerator program and the Mayor’s Green Finance program, which has provided £1.7m ($2.19m) to fund the technical and commercialization work to develop the commercial case for the network.

The area has a well-established data center footprint with Virtus, Ark Data Centres, Microsoft, and Vantage, all present in the area.

Commenting on the agreement, Adam Shalapin, vice president of global Sustainability, Vantage, said: “By powering our data centers with renewable energy and supplying the surplus heat to this innovative district heating network, we are taking a holistic approach to resource efficiency and sustainability.”

In October 2024, Old Oak and Park Royal were designated as one of the UK’s initial heat network zones by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ). DESNZ selected six towns and cities to develop the heat network zones including, Leeds, Plymouth, Bristol, Stockport, Sheffield, and London.

The program aims to create networks of insulated underground pipes that distribute heat from centralized sources to large, non-domestic buildings and those already communally heated. Construction on the zones is expected to begin in 2026.

District heating from data centers is already well-established across Europe, with the Nordic regions in particular at the forefront of development. Stockholm Data Parks is a notable example of an urban data center campus in Stockholm, where each facility is linked to the city’s district heating network.

Founded in 2012, Heimko (previously known as Pinnacle Power) is a Cumbria-based company that focuses on the development of town and city-wide low-carbon heat networks.