Why Helsinki Feels Like Heaven

Why Helsinki Feels Like Heaven(motherboard.vice.com)

36 points by aspratley 11 years ago | 10 comments

cgabios 11 years ago |

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.)

icanhackit 11 years ago |

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

ddeck 11 years ago |

>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.

deckar01 11 years ago |

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...

13thLetter 11 years ago | |

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.

adamgray 11 years ago |

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...

MaysonL 11 years ago |

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

kriro 11 years ago |

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".

Dewie3 11 years ago |

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 11 years ago | |

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...