[Foundation-l] Wikimedia and Environment

[Teofilo]

2009/12/12, Geoffrey Plourde <geo.plrd at yahoo.com>:
> With regards to Florida, if the servers are in an office building, one way to >decrease costs might be to reconfigure the environmental systems to use the >energy from the servers to heat/cool the building. Wikimedia would then be able >to recoup part of the utility bills from surrounding tenants.

I am not sure the laws of thermodynamics (1) would allow to use that
heat to cool a building. You would need a cold source like a river to
convert heat back into electricity. But it might be more cost
efficient to have the water from the river circulate directly into the
building, so that your extra heat is still remaining unused.

This is why I think it is more difficult to find solutions in a hot
country like Florida than in a cold country (as long as you don't
question the very existence of heated homes in cold countries, leaving
aside the possibility of moving people and their homes from cold to
warm countries).

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics#Second_law