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Gigantic heat caverns in Mustikkamaa have now been filled with water (2021)

helen.fi

81–90 of 106 posts

Re: Gigantic heat caverns in Mustikkamaa have now been filled with water (2021)

#81
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know people who attend sit-in protests at Chase Bank locations over fossil fuel divestment who also fly internationally 3-4 times per year for pleasure. The cognitive dissonance and lack of engineering intuition among the general populace is staggering.

If there were less investment in fossil fuel exploration, prices for fossil fuels could rise and airfare might be priced more appropriately. They would fly less because it cost more, or trains and boats might become more competitive. Moaning about individual "cognitive dissonance" is absolute nonsense when talking about global scale problems that require policy solutions. The activists' intuitions are more correct th…

What do you think trains and ships are fueled with exactly?

Re: Gigantic heat caverns in Mustikkamaa have now been filled with water (2021)

#82
post #77
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know people who attend sit-in protests at Chase Bank locations over fossil fuel divestment who also fly internationally 3-4 times per year for pleasure. The cognitive dissonance and lack of engineering intuition among the general populace is staggering.

there are other ways to look at it though Is it more or less hypocritical than someone who pays lip service to climate change, flies 3-4 times a year and doesn't go to sit ins? Their total overall alignment of their actions and their words are probably greater than vast majority of people who also don't even consider emissions from flying but say they care about climate change. It's legitimate to agitate for change a…

No? They’re literally more hippocritical?

That’s like saying the catholic priest is more aligned with their sermons, even if they’re having random hookups too?

Re: Gigantic heat caverns in Mustikkamaa have now been filled with water (2021)

#83
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sibling comments are on to this too, but I think an important detail here is that the water in lakes, river and ground in the nordics is so clean that the extra cleaning needed to make it "tap water" isn't really as big of a deal as it might be in other parts of the world.

The little town I live in (about 40 km south of Oslo) is supplied from a lake in the granite hills. They filter out the bugs and precipitate the solids with a little aluminium sulphate and that's it. It's above all the agriculture so no chlorine is needed and there is no chalk so no problems with deposits on the insides of kettles and water heaters.

Does it taste good?

My favorite so far has been Vienna - I would describe it as similar to Evian.

Re: Gigantic heat caverns in Mustikkamaa have now been filled with water (2021)

#84

I wonder why they used tap water instead of seawater

Why they should use seawater? Fresh water is not in shortage in this region - yearly precipitation significantly exceeds evaporation.

Slightly higher boiling point? Fewer antimicrobial additives required?

Re: Gigantic heat caverns in Mustikkamaa have now been filled with water (2021)

#85
Great to see the perception of energy-waste leading to new ventures. In the past century wasted energy had become a blind-spot (except when it led to some environmental effects - killing fish for example).

Thought was seldom given to re-using heat (let alone storing it) after its primary purpose. (I don't recall ever seeing any meta-survey of the scope of this near-blindness ... but it has to have become enormous ...) Home-heating solutions have usually been limited to the cost for consumers rather than the environment. That will have to change drastically.

Re: Gigantic heat caverns in Mustikkamaa have now been filled with water (2021)

#86
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The municipal heating network consists of both cooling and warming networks. Excess heat from, for example, data centers will be used to heat the water. Newer apartments are cooled using cold water from the network in the summer and heated using hot water in the winter. There are also joint power-and-heat plants connected to the heating network which are quite efficient: first the generated heat is used to drive a ge…

We do have buildings here in Toronto that are cooled using pumped water from Lake Ontario, which is very close to the downtown. And I suspect a heat pump could be used to provide heat by the same process. But in general I don't think it's being done at scale.

The Toronto system uses heat exchangers on the incoming tap water supply. So everyone (close to that leg of the water treatment system) gets slightly warmer tap water in summer time.

Re: Gigantic heat caverns in Mustikkamaa have now been filled with water (2021)

#87
post #2

This energy storage system near Helsinki, Finland operated by Helen ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Oy ) might be interesting for HN readers. Some facts from previous article ( https://www.helen.fi/en/news/2020/mustikkamaa ), not sure which one would've been better in url field: District heat is stored in two rock caverns in Mustikkamaa. The temperature of the water in the caverns varies between 50 and 90 °C. T…

This is a cool project, and I'm sure it has many benefits beyond just carbon savings. But 21,000 tonnes per year is surprisingly little in the scheme of things. Equivalent of about 150 or so long-haul 777 flights?

A reduction in foreign energy dependency is always nice to have. They can also use the geothermal to generate electricity. The carbon savings aren't that much but nearly free energy sources are nice to have.

Re: Gigantic heat caverns in Mustikkamaa have now been filled with water (2021)

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Protesting Chase doesn’t stop investments. It just pushes them elsewhere. Those activists are morons and stopping their flights would do far more to help than to protest a single bank. If they were protesting the government to massively increase oil taxes then you might have a point. Alas, they don’t have any economic intuition.

If those protestors did not have tickets on those flights, somebody else would be able to purchase them. It's not like the plane isn't going to fly that route because of this. So whether the protesters fly or somebody else, the plane is still make the emissions you're concerned about.

If enough people didn't buy tickets, then the airlines would have to reduce capacity on the routes, and that would reduce emissions.

Re: Gigantic heat caverns in Mustikkamaa have now been filled with water (2021)

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard people joke that if a Finnish person just spends enough time in Estonia they start to understand it :)

Finns will say that Estonian sounds like some kind of really odd super-rural accent. Estonians will say they wonder why the heck it takes a Finn twice as long as an Estonian to say the same thing.

Haha yeah definitely! I was watching the news where Estonian people were interviewed. While there were Finnish subtitles I could understand maybe half of the sentences without them, but the words would be "really odd super-rural", which I found funny.

Also, I'm not sure if it's a thing in Estonian, but I've heard in Lithuania or Latvian there's no distinction between spoken and written language.

Example from Finnish:

* Minä means I/me in written Finnish

* Mä/Mää/Mie/... is what people typically use in spoken language

Which is what some of my international friends have been complaining about the Finnish courses at my university -- that they learn the written Finnish from their 101 books, but it's not so useful since in daily interactions people just use spoken Finnish.

And well maybe the minä -> mä you can see the length difference. Maybe Estonian is just more advanced in the "spoken-ness", if you will, of the language.

Here you can see the different "minä"s by region in Finland: https://yle.fi/a/74-20010020. The article's in Finnish, but just scroll down and you can still very much understand the map.

Here's the article Google-translated to English, but I'm not sure if it would also translate the "minä"s: https://yle-fi.translate.goog/a/74-20010020?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x...

Re: Gigantic heat caverns in Mustikkamaa have now been filled with water (2021)

#90
post #2

This energy storage system near Helsinki, Finland operated by Helen ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Oy ) might be interesting for HN readers. Some facts from previous article ( https://www.helen.fi/en/news/2020/mustikkamaa ), not sure which one would've been better in url field: District heat is stored in two rock caverns in Mustikkamaa. The temperature of the water in the caverns varies between 50 and 90 °C. T…

> The temperature of the water in the caverns varies between 50 and 90 °C. Presumably 50 is in April or May and 90 is in August or September. Or are these swings shorter-term ?

Yea that is one thing missing. Is it seasonal heat storage, or for balancing wind power?
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