SASKATOON, SASKATCHEWAN – 9 June 2026

As the artificial intelligence, crypto mining, and cloud computing boom accelerates, data centers are facing intense scrutiny over their environmental footprint. A single data center can consume up to 5 million gallons of water per day to cool all those computers.

Canadian clean-tech firm TESS Research Ltd. offers a closed-loop alternative: data center cooling without the massive water consumption.

TESS units were originally developed for grid balancing. “Renewable energy is a vital tool in our fight against global warming,” inventor D’Arcy Mann muses, “but when it’s 2 o’clock in the morning and high winds want to crank those wind generators, there’s nowhere for that power to go.”

Power companies can sometimes send surplus power to other communities on the grid where demand is higher. But when there is low demand across a large area, they have to shut down generators – only to bring them back online when demand picks up.

This high voltage on-off-on system can be very expensive. And building large grid storage facilities, like fields of batteries, is even more expensive.

“I created TESS to solve these problems”, Mann continues. “Instead of power companies spending billions on grid balancing and storage, homeowners with TESS installed could use this surplus power by turning it into home and water heating.”

A thermal battery takes in electricity, converts it to heat, and stores that heat for later use.

“Running all of our electronics in a modern house takes a lot of energy, but more than three quarters of the energy used in your house is for heating” Mann observes. “And thermal batteries are a lot cheaper to install and maintain than walls of lithium ion batteries.”

TESS thermal batteries have a unique additional feature – they can take in surplus heat directly.

“I listened to colleagues complaining of too much heat where they didn’t want it”, Mann recalls. “Hot rooms full of computer servers, greenhouses, large compost heaps, you name it. Heat is energy. Instead of spending more energy to get rid of it, move it to where it’s wanted.”

It’s this feature that solves the data center water problem.

“People want the benefits of the internet, which requires warehouses full of computer servers churning away running the apps and websites that we use. Data centers are here to stay. But their reliance on millions of liters of water a day for cooling is ecologically unsustainable,” said Mann.

“Because TESS can take in and store heat, we’ve turned a waste-management problem into a resource. We aren’t just cooling data centers without water; we’re harvesting that thermal energy and using it to heat water and living spaces.”

The technology scales seamlessly from localized residential applications – where smaller fridge-sized units provide home heating and hot water – up to industrial units within a standard 40-foot shipping container.

To transition the technology from the laboratory to commercial deployment, TESS Research Ltd. is cultivating strategic partners within the power generation and software industries. The company aims to deploy an initial fleet of 300 TESS units in selected northern and remote communities for comprehensive field testing. These pilot programs will demonstrate the technology’s durability in harsh climates while significantly reducing or eliminating heating costs for northern and remote populations.