In France, around 90 TWh of waste-heat potential remains to be recovered every year, including 85.2 TWh from industry alone (ADEME, 2025). This represents a significant underused resource at a time when France must decarbonize its heating sector and reduce energy dependency. The opportunity is growing further with the rapid expansion of data centers. In a rapid-decarbonization trajectory, their electricity consumption could reach 15–20 TWh per year by 2030, compared with around 5 TWh in 2025 (RTE,2025). As data center electricity consumption grows, so will the amount of waste heat generated by these facilities.
Simultaneously, new regulations stemming from the EU Energy Efficiency Directive (2023/1791), transposed into French law through the 2025 DDADUE Act and its implementing decree, require data centers with a total nominal power of at least 1 MW to recover and reuse their waste heat. As of 2026, the French regulatory framework sets an Energy Reuse Factor (ERF) of at least 20% as the threshold for meeting the heat-reuse requirement.
Despite this urgency and regulatory push, recovery remains limited due to technical barriers (low heat temperatures, distance to end-users), economic constraints (high infrastructure costs, seasonal demand mismatches), and governance gaps (fragmented stakeholders, lack of territorial coordination). Your mission is to design a realistic pathway and concrete solution to recover and utilize waste heat from data centers and/or industrial sites, demonstrating how 100% recovery could become achievable by 2035.
Your proposal must show:
- A concrete recovery solution (technical system, business model, or territorial arrangement) with a clear timeline indicating key milestones toward scaling up to full heat recovery.
You are free to choose an angle from which to explore technical, economic, social, or territorial solutions that:
- Optimize existing resources (e.g., heat pumps, district heating, thermal storage, direct reuse in buildings/agriculture),
- Overcome obstacles (e.g., financing models, stakeholder coordination, regulatory incentives),
- Prepare for the post-2035 period (e.g., integration into urban planning, "heat-ready" data center design standards).
Deliverables:
Report: Documenting and describing the proposed solution.
Video pitch: 3 min promoting pitch of the proposed solution answering the questions “what is your solution and its benefits?” and “why should we support it?”
The deadline for submit the deliverables is: February 25th, 2027, 23:59 France time.