Why would a data center need to continously consume water to cool itself? Leaks?
this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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Evaporative cooling systems, such as cooling towers, so that water is non-recoverable.
The article however is mentioning that 3/4 of the water use cited is indirect through power generation.
Didn't know those were a thing
Water is extremely important in most large scale cooling systems, whether it be swamp coolers (aka evaporative cooling) or traditional HVAC (aka chillers).
That water will be recovered as rain.
But probably will end in ocean
And evaporate to become rain again and again.
I mean, sure, but that's not ideal for us
It will rain somewhere. Generally places that already have rain. If you're counting global amount, we have plenty of fresh water, but we don't have it in the places where we need it.
That can still turn into a local deficit in areas with little rainfall
Evaporative coolers are cheap. It can be done with non-evaporative coolers, but is far more expensive to build.
Not to mention a much higher carbon footprint.
The reason evaporative coolers are cheap is because they use a fraction of the electricity that chillers do.
And note that the majority of data center water usage is indirect via power generation, so using less water on site but more indirectly by consuming more power is both more expensive and less efficient.
Unfortunately, evaporative coolers are the best way to go, for now.
When calculating water use, it's important to not only look at the water used directly to cool data centers, but also at the water used by power plants to generate that 205TWh.
The researchers also tracked the water used by wastewater treatment plants due to data centers, as well as the water used by power plants to power that portion of the wastewater treatment site's workload.
From Google's blog:
Last year, our global data center fleet consumed approximately 4.3 billion gallons of water. This is comparable to the water needed to irrigate and maintain 29 golf courses in the southwest U.S. each year.
From the WaPo article:
A large data center, researchers say, can gobble up anywhere between 1 million and 5 million gallons of water a day — as much as a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people.