Rob Thorntonis President and CEO of the International District Energy Association (IDEA). He has spent more than four decades working in one of the energy sector’s most overlooked areas: recovering and reusing heat that would otherwise go to waste.
Much of that opportunity now lies indata centers, which consume huge amounts of electricity and convert almost all of it into heat. Rather than simply rejecting that energy through cooling systems, district energy networks can capture it, upgrade it with heat pumps where needed, and distribute it to nearby homes, offices, hospitals, and campuses.
