It's a story about carefully examining the differences when changing technologies and avoiding imprecise or dual use terms like "waste." This is something that should come naturally to a hackers forum, but a bit of marketing does get mixed in here from time to time, and people can't seem to help themselves from embellishing interesting new technologies into universally improved solutions.
So.. you get this back and forth between the two camps as they rush to take victory laps around each other.
It's not a new technology, though. The Vancouver system mentioned in the article has been in operation since 2010, which may be a short time in infrastructure terms, but similar systems that extract waste heat from sewage have been in commercial operation since at least the mid-1980's. The system in Vancouver is now being expanded to 9 MW of power output, but there's a similar one in Stockholm that first opened in 1986 that now has an output of 225 MW. That one uses treated wastewater though, while the one in Vancouver operates on raw sewage that hasn't hit the treatment plant yet.
District heating is at a different scale in northern Europe and especially in Scandinavia. The systems in North America are (with a few exceptions) typically local to a campus, a neighborhood or a small downtown area, serving maybe a hundred buildings with maybe tens of kilometers of pipes. The public heating utility in Stockholm alone serves 800,000 people, has over 3000 km of pipes and generates over 8,000 GWh of heat energy in a typical year. It's kind of the default way of heating most buildings, here. The main exception is single family homes where past eras of cheap electricity often made people prefer other heating methods.
Such systems don't have to be huge to be useful, but the bigger they are, the more opportunities you have to move heat from places that don't want it (data centers, industry in general, etc) to places that do.
> avoiding imprecise or dual use terms like "waste."
Reminds me of the Texas power grid failure due to being an energy market designed by ENRON (still is too!). Turns out the opposite of “efficiency” isn’t “waste” it’s “redundancy” which their design is very efficient at getting rid of.
Well, moving away from "efficiency" can take you toward redundancy, but it doesn't have to. Some waste is just wasteful. It's important not to oversimplify, otherwise you wind up with counterproductive memes like "that project is justified because it will create jobs" or "the free market is the best solution for every problem" (it's a great solution for some problems, but ignores externalities).
Unfortunately the English language makes me choose between completely conveying nuance at all times and being understood and upvoted (people prefer short and pithy over long and subtly more correct).
I agree with your followup 100%. I didn’t write it in my original as it would have watered down my main communication goal.
Whenever says something is being made more “efficient” I ask them what they are trading for what.
So.. you get this back and forth between the two camps as they rush to take victory laps around each other.