Europe's forced transition away from Russian gas and oil has led to inflation, civil discontent and…a possible effective, real-world use for crypto mining, data centers, social media sites and so on.
As The Wall Street Journal reports, all that online activity not only consumes a lot of energy, it also produces a huge amount of heat as the computers try to keep pace with our doom scrolling. And that heat may finally be put to good use:
In the past year, Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp. have started connecting, or announced plans to connect, major data centers to district heating systems in Ireland, Denmark and Finland. Alphabet Inc.'s Google has said it is assessing opportunities to recover heat from its data centers across Europe.
It's not a game-changing solution to the West's energy needs. But it's not beanbag, either:
Data centers in proximity to district heating systems could provide as much as roughly 50 terawatt-hours a year of excess heat, according to a study from ReUseHeat, an EU-funded project aimed at promoting waste-heat reuse. That would work out to between 2% and 3% of the energy that EU households used on space heating in 2020, according to data from Eurostat.
Considering how quickly Europe needs to find alternatives to Putin's energy sources, every little bit of new supply helps. And who knows? Perhaps endlessly scrolling through social media might help undermine Putin's regime. At last, a good use for Facebook.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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Well, if they can use the hot air generated by tweeting, why can’t they capture the hot air from congress and use that?
Right…I was about to say: all he hot air from political grandstanding has to be good for something…at long last.
Tap Iceland volcanoes
Oil under No Sea
Coal mines for power
OR Go nuclear