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Lumi5 t1_jc7dtub wrote

Reply to comment by CharacterOtherwise77 in Tiny data centre used to heat public swimming pool by je97

In Finland we do have a pretty efficient way of transporting heat. It's called district heating and plenty of houses in larger towns are getting their heating through that. Basically it's very well insulated water pipes going around the city. Actually 46 percent of residential and service buildings in Finland are heated by that.

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CharacterOtherwise77 t1_jc7f8w1 wrote

But you also get brutal winters, so it was out of necessity not just efficiency. NOT having heat could be deadly there

With server farms they create heat, it's the opposite problem that exacerbates itself. Then they use more power to cool them which creates more heat, more refuse.

Should we dig up all the concrete roads and run pipes across buildings? That will never happen.

We should be making servers that run cooler by making the chips a certain size, and by creating chips which are more specialized rather than having 16 core computers that can do everything.

The same server that runs google can run Doom, that makes no sense to me.

Also I love Finland and bless you all.

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Lumi5 t1_jc7h98e wrote

Converting current infrastructure to accommodate that might not be very feasible. But planning future projects with this in mind is completely reasonable. We already have a data center in Helsinki that's providing heating for up to 20 000 apartments.

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