

Why Helsinki Feels Like Heaven - aspratley
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/why-helsinki-feels-like-heaven

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cgabios
Stanford has its own cogen steam and chilled water (underground "ice cube")
capabilities, in addition to power generation. Many such campuses use the
industrial central plant model because it's cheaper and more efficient at
scale. Residential areas could leverage this and other utilities (like
internet) if people get out there, organize and develop compelling,
sustainable operational (quasi-business) models that can compete with for-
profit. Because it doesn't make sense to have an entire neighborhood with
excess internet capacity and individual wifi boxes, having to have one "own"
of everything is demonstrably wasteful compared to "sharing economy"
alternatives. (Steam and chilled water as well, since temperature regulation
is usually the number one energy consumer in a household without an EV.)

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icanhackit
I proposed an idea for cheaply cooling tall office buildings to a mechanical
engineer and structural engineer that they thought was interesting but we were
all a little drunk at the time so we didn't even get to calcs on a napkin
stage...

It's a very old and widely used concept that just needs scaling up - using the
Stack Effect [0] by turning the core of a building into a giant chimney that
extends/protrudes past the populated floors to maximize temperature
difference. The elevators would run along the exterior of the building to free
up the space in the core, with the added bonus that you're not limited by the
space in the core and can have an array of elevators to move lots of people.

You could even pair it with water reservoirs to create a sort of low-tech
evaporative air-conditioning. Bonus points for using the extrusions/paneling
on the building exterior for catching rain water and storing it in the
reservoirs.

I think the main issue is that it would need some proper fire safety modelling
to make sure you don't create a giant blow-torch if someone in the lower
suites burns some toast or leaves a dodgy floor heater running overnight.

Disclaimer: I am in no way qualified to say whether this would work

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_effect](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_effect)

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ddeck
_> In fact, the proliferation of air conditioners has increased to such a
degree that it has slowly begun to modify humans, lowering our species’
threshold for heat._

What fact would that be? The linked article to support this bold claim is a
health advice piece from the University of Iowa suggesting that the average
body acclimatizes to warmer or cooler environments over a two-week period.

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deckar01
This reminds me of fracking. Pumping all of our heat into the earth's crust
seems like it could have some long term consequence. If only we could could
send our heat into space some how...

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13thLetter
The amount of "heat" pumped into the Earth by fracking is meaningless on the
unimaginably huge scale of a whole planet, so you can relax.

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adamgray
There are a lot of buildings within the Chicago Loop that use cold water from
the river for cooling. Here's an article I found about it:
[http://www.sustainable-chicago.com/2010/03/11/cold-as-ice-
ho...](http://www.sustainable-chicago.com/2010/03/11/cold-as-ice-how-downtown-
chicago-keeps-cool/)

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MaysonL
There's also the "ice pond"[0] technique: freezing and storing water in the
winter to use for air conditioning in the summer.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_pond](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_pond)

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kriro
This is a pretty neat concept. Seems like former mining regions might be good
testbeds (as long as there's some sort of water supply).

Also interesting that they don't stop at cooling but go for "trigeneration".

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Dewie3
I wouldn't even have thought that Helsinki needed that much cooling in the
summer. The summer highs aren't that high (Wikipedia), so it's interesting how
they still have a large infrastructure for cooling the city.

I don't think I've used air conditioning in the summer before. Though my
summers are usually cooler than Helsinki's, apparently.

~~~
aspratley
In a different location but no that far away sea water was/is being used to
cool a data center:
[http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/02/21/video...](http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/02/21/video-
helsinkis-underground-data-center/)

