alt Hacker NewsI never looked into this, but why would a datacenter consume water for cooling in the first place? Sure, they use some. But just like you fill up the cooling loop in a car, once it is there it just circulates between the heat source and radiators and/or heat exchangers, with perhaps some minimal top off needed (since flexible tubing isn't 100% water proof).
Or are they for some unfathomable reason using evaporative cooling in data centers?
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It’s usually open loop - closed loop, so closed loop goes through CRACs or liquid cooled equipment manifolds. That heated water circulates through an heat exchanger on the roof that uses open loop cooling to shed the heat to the surrounding environment.
(ab)using fresh water in vast quantities is cheaper.
currently.
and also more energy efficient, because evaporating water away takes a lot of energy with it. you have to raise radiators to a higher temperature to keep up with that, or have much more surface area.
It’s very efficient. The net electrical energy saved using the latent heat of water is 30 to 100+ times greater than the energy required to desalinate or wastewater recycle the same volume of water.
the unfathomable reason is that it is significantly more energy efficient.
At the scale DCs are operating at, losses from flexible tubing are not negligible either.
1gw of power converts approx 400 liters of cold water into steam _per second_.
Evaporative cooling is practically a cooling cheat code. Why unfathomable? What's more efficient?
Evaporative cooling consumes less expensive electricity than air conditioning. Electricity is much more expensive than water (for the same cooling load) in most places DCs are located.