this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2024
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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How heat pumps can turn wasted energy into low-carbon whisky :A century-old Scottish distillery has halved its CO2 emissions with waste-heat recovery tech. (www.canarymedia.com)
submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I think there's a lot of opportunity for reducing wasted energy in many buildings. Even the term "waste heat" is indicative that energy is typically exhausted when it could be used for space or water heating. Obviously mechanical modifications would be needed, sometimes extensive, but it's a good option for reducing energy use.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It's actually a really cool concept honestly. I do this on a very tiny scale at home. I run a small server cluster largely as a playground but also for things like Plex and Vaultwarden. The waste heat from that is pushed out the back of the rack and a heat pump water heater a few feet away uses that to help heat water.

As you said, seems like there are many opportunities to do this on a much lager scale.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

Nice, I have much the same setup in my house!

I visited the recently Passive House certified student residence buildings at the University of Victoria, and the heat recovery there is quite interesting. Passive House requires a very low heating load, so they recover all the heat they can from the commercial kitchen (the presence of which is rare in a Passive House because of high ventilation requirements) processes such as ventilation hoods and refrigeration systems and put it into the DHW system.

They had to get a bit creative with the design, but it's really not that complicated. More just not doing things the way they've always been done.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

One huge use I can see, but isn't being used as far as I'm aware, is data centers. They use a ton of energy, but when it turns to heat it's only seen as a negative to expel. Why not capture it and use it to heat houses/water or something? It turns the massive energy use into effectively near zero, since heating is needed anyway in a lot of places.