New Haven, Connecticut, has broken ground on an ambitious geothermal energy network that will provide low-emission heating and cooling to the city’s bustling, historic Union Station and a new public housing complex across the street.
The project will play a crucial role in the city’s attempt to decarbonize all municipal buildings and transportation by the end of 2030. As one of Connecticut’s first geothermal energy networks, it will also serve as a case study of how well the technology can both lower energy costs and reduce greenhouse gas emissions as the state considers promoting wider adoption of these systems.
“At the end of the day, you’re going to have the most efficient heating and cooling system available for our historic train station as well as roughly 1,000 units of housing,” said Steven Winter, New Haven’s executive director of climate and sustainability. “Anything we can help do to improve health outcomes and reduce climate change–causing emissions is really valuable.”
I still can’t imagine for the life of me why we’re not using waste heat from datacenters to power … well, anything.
Datacenters are generally not build near other things, and when they are, they use the cheapest and easiest way to shed heat, not the options that require coordination with city/state/etc to use that waste heat responsibly.
I know the finland is doing some interesting things with giant heat sand batteries. That seems like an easy win to mandate for datacenters to provide. Then a municipality could “hook up” to it and use the heat how they see fit.
I also think datacenters should be required to to coat every external surface in solar panels, including their parking lots with solar canopies. It wont offset their power usage by much, but its literally the least they can do for the surrounding community.
