Currently a Facebook datacenter in Denmark is supplying around 10.000 homes with heating.
You can argue that Facebook isn't actually doing anything useful, but still, it's better than to waste the generated heat.
You can argue that Facebook isn't actually doing anything useful, but still, it's better than to waste the generated heat.
Facebook has a good and bad side just like humans do. For example, if Facebook got rid of the ability to post news, it would be a much better place.
If Google and Facebook would block news on my country I wouldn't notice much.
Still, if enough people would be fed up with FB, their dominance would fade away. Well, afaik Telegram (and Signal) gained lots marketshare lateley, so lets see
There are plenty. There is no mirror corporation doing exactly the same thing under a different name. But there is no mirror to Microsoft, Google, Apple or any other large tech corp. These are corporations backed by ironclad IP laws meaning nobody can every play on exactly the same field. For something like facebook, the competitor is all things not facebook. Every time you share a new story via SMS, you are competing with facebook. Every time you send a message via email rather than via facebook you are competing with facebook. And ever time you visit a store's own website rather than their facebook page, you deny facebook a tiny bit of the world. That is the serious competitor.
But you probably don't need social media.
Edit: It's should be noted that most Danish cities already have a remote heating infrastructure in place. Aside from the regulatory issues, it's mostly a question of hooking up datacenters and other heat producing industries to that infrastructure. In most places utilising the remote heating isn't voluntary, if it's available where you live, your home has to be connected.
Things like datacenters are slowly replacing coal fired heating plants, because most of those plants where made to generate electricity, but that's now supplied by more and more renewable energy. So cities need to find other sources of heat, to replace the volume no longer coming from the power plants. Where I live that's datacenters, waste incinerators and heavy industry.
As a new thing, remote cooling is now also attempted by using cold water from limepits.
It’s interesting you can also use remote cooling from lime pits.
There's a brochure from the national innovation fund that mentions a town actually covering about half of its heating needs with heat from a data center, though. [3]
Swedish telco Telia also has had similar plans for a data center in Helsinki, Finland, and their website says their "goal is to recover and reuse all the heat produced" [4], but I'm not sure how much weight to give that since proclaiming a goal only costs a few words. It would be nicer if they said what they're actually doing at the moment even if it were much less than "all of it".
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/from-deep-underground-data-cen...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jul/20/helsinki...
[3] https://www.sitra.fi/en/cases/district-heating-from-data-cen...
[4] https://www.telia.fi/business/telia-helsinki-data-center
https://helsinkismart.fi/case/waste-not-want-not-data-center...