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Comment by selectodude | Hacker News Reader

There is a large building in Chicago that basically contains a giant ice cube.

https://www.enwave.com/locations/chicago.htm

From their website I gleaned that they have 5 facilities, and several miles of piping that carries ice-cold water to their customers, large buildings around.

It's the maximally outsourced air-conditioning solution I ever saw :)

District cooling (as opposed to district heating) is fairly common in Gulf countries.

They're around in the US as well. Worked on one in downtown Austin in a previous life.

I hadn't heard the term "district heating" before, but it makes sense.

The name puts me in mind of a chain called District Taco, but unfortunately that doesn't mean a supply of tacos piped directly into your house.

https://www.districttaco.com/

Not even slightly authentically Mexican, but nonetheless quite tasty.

The city of Munich in Germany actually has a cooling network to cool large buildings in the city centre. See here: https://www.swm.de/geschaeftskunden/fernkaelte

Helsinki too has district cooling in addition to district heating: https://www.helen.fi/en/news/2018/cooling-demand-in-helsinki...

Paris has a large cold water network:

https://www.climespace.fr/en

It's used by some datacenters IIRC.

FWIW they suck at their job. Every year there are some days where we don't have AC in the office during summer because they stop sending cold water to the building I work in.

There’s versions of this in NYC that use the bay as a first pass heat exchanger. Not sure how deep or cold the Chicago river is but I’d think they’d be able to do the same.

Don't forget that Chicago has Lake Michigan too.

The city of Austin has a chilled water loop and more. It's pretty neat how it all works. https://austinenergy.com/ae/commercial/commercial-services/d...

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