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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

The Minnesota versions of those are the places they dump snow cleared from roads. Some of them last into July. Somebody should tell these guys to add a nice insulating layer of dirt.

https://blogs.mprnews.org/newscut/2017/06/despite-heat-snow-...

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Its how the local hospital here is cooled during the summer. Large pile of snow which is covered in wood chips. Apparently it generated 1345,3 MWh cooling energy in 2002..

http://www.snowpower.se/sundsvalls-kylanlaggning_en.asp

Wow, that's pretty cool.

Picture: http://miljonytta.se/byggnader/lagrad-sno-ger-fjarrkyla/

(Site's down for me)

Cornell does something similar, using Cayuga Lake as a heat sink for their campus cooling:

https://medium.com/cornell-university/lake-source-cooling-d3...

As does the city of Toronto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_water_source_cooling

I heard that they actually changed the temperature of the lake that way.

It's something they could store underground to help refrigeration in summer for e.g. public buildings. Actually that (= storing ice in winter in a basement) is how refrigeration was often done before the invention of the refrigerator / freezer.

This is actually still done in many large cities with time-of-day electricity prices. The cooling is done using typical cooling equipment, but instead of directly cooling the air in the building during the day, ice is built up thoughout the night when electricity is cheap and the outdoor air is cool. During the day, the air in the building is cooled with melting ice and the normal refrigeration equipment is used as a daytime backup only.

Snow cleared from road is exceptionally dirty. It has sand, salt, any other chemicals used for snowmelt, and then engine oil.

Why don't you mail the guy? or message him on facebook.

Seems like this would have occured to them already, over the hundreds of hours of time invested.

Anyway, it seems to me that dirt would absorb more heat than ice, resulting in faster melting.

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