Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well a few considerations: - You have to size your cooling towers for your hottest hour. Doing this saves you no capital costs. - You barely have to run the fans on your cooling towers in the winter because the air is so cold. So often this also won’t save you much operating costs. - Already there is an essentially unlimited amount of so called “waste heat” from power plants and factories. Building district heating s…
I don't think I ever said it reduced capital cost. I agree (though you might be willing to take more risk on reducing redundancy e.g instead of 2+1 cooling towers you may be more willing to just buy 2). You cannot put a power station in the middle of a city centre, you can put a datacentre there. The main reason this isn't done more is that it's expensive to build heat network between the 'far out of town industrial…
Something like 20 MW of capacity so far!