this post was submitted on 19 May 2026
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I gotta wonder, given the power bill of these sites, why they're letting so much heat energy out into the atmosphere
Surely at least some of that heat could be tuned back into electricity. Yeah it's not gonna pay all the bills, but surely at a certain level of scale, there's gotta be some benefit in it just from an economical standpoint, let alone the ecological benefits of not accelerating climate change
For the same reason why they let so much water evaporate. They could convert some of that heat back into electricity, just like they could run closed-loop cooking systems, but it would cost more money than it would save. There's no financial incentive to do so....
.... Until regulators start insisting! These datacenter folks have gobs of money, we shouldn't be shy about requiring them to not ruin the local environment.
It would be best to do it on a national level, otherwise these folks will just shift the development to someplace without the regulations.