A Cascaded Data-Center Waste-Heat Network for Regenerative Agriculture and Low-Temperature Industrial Drying

This preprint presents a conceptual feasibility and screening model for integrating a 1-MW liquid-cooled data center with a cascaded thermal-reuse network serving regenerative agriculture, protected cultivation, root-zone heating, agricultural drying, and low-temperature lumber drying. The architecture treats agriculture as a dispatchable secondary heat-reuse branch rather than the sole data-center heat sink. A supervisory control system allocates recovered heat among productive loads according to temperature grade, seasonal demand, crop and soil constraints, drying requirements, and data-center cooling reliability, while retaining full-capacity auxiliary heat rejection. Under the stated monthly-average screening assumptions, the agricultural network uses approximately 3,763 MWh-th/year, or 43.0% of the 8,760 MWh-th/year reference heat source. Adding a 400-kW dispatchable lumber-drying load increases modeled useful annual heat utilization to approximately 6,916 MWh-th/year, or 78.9%. These results are screening-model outputs, not experimentally demonstrated performance or cooling-electricity savings. The paper defines the prior-art boundary, principal engineering uncertainties, and a falsification pathway leading to an 8,760-hour weather-driven simulation and subsequent physical validation.