GoKawiil
Tech News
Data centers generate heat continuously, and researchers are examining ways to capture that excess warmth and store it underground using the earth's stable temperature, so it can later be drawn out to heat buildings during colder months. The approach relies on the fact that ground temperature a few hundred feet down stays near the local yearly average, roughly 50°F, regardless of surface conditions.
A year-long investigation by Lighthouse Report, Trouw and other European media found that most data centers in Europe do not disclose their electricity and water consumption, despite an EU directive requiring larger facilities to report such data. In the Netherlands, fewer than a quarter of the 186 commercial data centers with capacity of 500 kW or more have published usage figures, and the national agency tasked with collecting this data has records for only 104 of them.
MIT Technology Review's latest list of under-35 innovators highlights researchers and founders working on climate tech, including Jae-Won Chung's software for measuring AI models' energy consumption, Jing Wei's AI-based pollution tracking, and Zhonghua Zheng's city-specific climate models. The list also features Mohammad Alkhadra of Lithios and Benjamin Mowbray of Rock Zero, two startups developing faster, cheaper methods to extract lithium from brine and hardrock ore respectively.
Volkswagen unveiled the Mission Efficiency, a near-production electric coupe prototype built on its MEB+ platform that shares components with the upcoming ID. Polo and ID. Cross models. The teardrop-shaped car achieved a drag coefficient of 0.158, which VW says makes it the world's most aerodynamic road-legal vehicle, and completed a 1,278 km trip from Wolfsburg to Vienna on one charge of its 54.9 kWh battery, arriving with 164 km of range left.