Office buildings wasting energy

Yep, they've started doing culls of unused desktops and servers, trying to push everyone to the cloud (I work for a company that makes one of those clouds so it probably makes sense to use it)

But there's still a few PC's left running scattered around

Plus all the fridges, coffee machines, vending machines, etc.

Absolutely, office space usage should be reported so it can be seen how much of it is wasted space these days

The thing which amazes me is that our office is rented, not owned, so they're paying the management company a lot of money for nothing. Although they're a big tenant so I suspect they're getting a serious discount

We're in the middle of a housing crisis and I wonder how much office space could be repurposed into living space. I don't think you could easily convert office buildings to apartments, but I think co living spaces would be achievable. Single ensuite rooms around the edge of the floor and dining and leisure facilities in the middle or something

It might also make a nice benefit for employers, they can offer worker dorms for some nominal rent and attract more talent. I used to work with a guy who did that out in Japan with the company he was with and he thought it was brilliant, got almost free accommodation in a high cost area

District heating in one of those ideas that's great in general but nobody ever bothers to implement it, unless it's somewhere you're likely to freeze to death

But yeah something like district heating would definitely help fight the "data centers r bad" argument that keeps flying around

It's hardly the biggest project ever. Dig trench, put pipes in street, cover. Yeah the DCs aren't right beside towns, but there's generally a residential area within a couple of kilometres. I mean there's entire cities powered by district heating through kilometres of pipework, so the engineering is already done to some extent

The biggest hurdle is the connection to the house, the homeowner would have the expense and hassle of groundworks to inside the house, plus probably a small heat pump to extract the heat from the incoming heat medium (I'm assuming they won't be circulating 75C water through the system)

You could even hook it up to a district thermal battery to store up some heat for later use

Yeah there would need to be some level of government support, but it's hardly the dumbest scheme they've put money into