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Thanks. That's a little better, because it has a higher chance of turning back to rain somewhere around (or at least making air a little more moist).
by krasin 3y ago
Thanks. That's a little better, because it has a higher chance of turning back to rain somewhere around (or at least making air a little more moist).
- nyrikki 3y agoIt won't rain where it is being used, Florida getting the rain from Arizona evaporation doesn't help out the Colorado basin.
- krasin 3y agoI agree. Which is why full water recirculation for datacenter cooling should probably be a law.
- Dylan16807 3y agoIt should work out a lot better, because 25C of cooling only requires you to lose 5% of the water per loop.
- krasin 3y agoIf the end result is a lot of freshwater lost, it's still very bad.
- Dylan16807 3y agoThe end result is 1/20th as much lost. So if that's still "very bad" then the other plan is "catastrophic". It's a very big improvement.
- nyrikki 3y agoThe problem is not just with the volume lost water but that they also dump concentrated brine water into the sewer system and most of these companies never actually came though with their promises to upgrade municipal treatment facilities. Millions of gallons of consumption and brine sewage is not a trivial problem for places that are rural.
- Dylan16807 3y agoThat sounds to me like the utility is charging them wrong. When I buy water it has sewer charges by default, which means if I concentrated that to seawater level they'd be getting 100x or 200x payments to process it, and even higher for brine. It's possible to meter the sewer separately, but there are extra charges for water with too much biochemical oxygen demand or suspended solids. Throw an extreme salinity charge on there so they can pay for full treatment and then some. Is there a reason to have datacenters directly fund facility upgrades?
- somat 3y agoIt is worse. In the sewer it renters the groundwater system, ready for immediate use. evaporate and it goes somewhere else. But the real take away is don't let the black journalism scare you. using water for an evaporation cooling system is about the least bad thing you can do with it.