this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2026
190 points (95.7% liked)

Canada

12611 readers
669 users here now

What's going on Canada?



Related Communities


🍁 Meta


🗺️ Provinces / Territories


🏙️ Cities / Local Communities

Sorted alphabetically by city name.


🏒 Sports

Baseball

Basketball

Curling

Hockey

Soccer


💻 Schools / Universities

Sorted by province, then by total full-time enrolment.


💵 Finance, Shopping, Sales


🗣️ Politics


🍁 Social / Culture


🌐 Other Relevant Communities


Rules

  1. Keep the original title when submitting an article. You can put your own commentary in the body of the post or in the comment section.

  2. Provide sources when making a claim. Do your research or google it doesn't cut it. The one making the claim is responsible for backing it.

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage: lemmy.ca


founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/74351191

A proposed data center in northwestern Alberta could generate dozens of atomic bombs worth of heat every day.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] etc@lemmy.ca 4 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Most data centres use some type of mechanical cooling (like AC) but instead of using compression, they can use a close system exchange with outdoor air. Still the same problem (several thousand households worth of heat in a single building), but it's at least not wasting clean water for it. They could use the heat to keep green houses warm, heat towns, or use it for power generation even.

But those all cost money, which is why they won't do it. This is the same type of planning that puts trains in a city above ground and builds multi million dollar buildings that will be torn down in 30 years because they are falling apart.

[–] xthexder@l.sw0.com 3 points 17 hours ago

They could use the heat to keep green houses warm, heat towns, or use it for power generation even.

Which is exactly what I'm suggesting?
I'm not talking about water consumption of evaporative cooling, I'm more talking about the massive power inputs that put 100% of that heat into the surrounding environment. It would be amazing if that could be reduced to only 70% of the energy input.