I know politicians are spineless but the obvious solution seems to be to keep increasing the cost of using water until the data centers switched to a closed system. Don’t most nuclear power plants recycle most of the water they use?
Charging the data centers more would also be a nice increase in revenue for the local municipal area
In regards to nuclear power plants, the first and second loops are recycled constantly but the third loop can either be recycled or open loop. That’s why most nuclear power plants are built next to large bodies of water. They use the water from a lake, ocean, or whatever to do the last cooling step. It’s possible but it’s not as cheap as throwing away the warm water once you’re done with it with cheap cold water.
They use adiabatic gas coolers on their refrigeration systems. Basically there is a perpetually wet piece of media that air runs through before it gets to the refrigeration coils. By running through that wet media you precool the air basically down to the current dewpoint by evaporating water and therefore you’re cooling the refrigeration coils with colder air which leads to more efficient opperation and reduces the size of the gas coolers required. From what I’ve seen a lot of these datacenters are also switching to CO2 based refirgeration systems which are generally better except the low critical temp of CO2 mean that their efficiency starts to drop quickly once the ambient temp gets much above 80F. Using adiabatic coolers mostly removes that shortfall.
I don’t get the news about these data centers guzzling water, where is the water going? If it’s for cooling, but that doesn’t destroy the water…
Evaporative cooling.
Can’t they recycle it.
Technically it gets recycled, by falling down in some other place.
Yes but that’s expensive. It’s a lot cheaper to just draw from the municipal supply and discharge it.
I know politicians are spineless but the obvious solution seems to be to keep increasing the cost of using water until the data centers switched to a closed system. Don’t most nuclear power plants recycle most of the water they use?
Charging the data centers more would also be a nice increase in revenue for the local municipal area
In regards to nuclear power plants, the first and second loops are recycled constantly but the third loop can either be recycled or open loop. That’s why most nuclear power plants are built next to large bodies of water. They use the water from a lake, ocean, or whatever to do the last cooling step. It’s possible but it’s not as cheap as throwing away the warm water once you’re done with it with cheap cold water.
By cooling it down? With what, water?
You can use water in a closed loop with air cooling.
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Evaporative cooling is one option, yes, but not the only one. Do we know what method these data centers are actually using?
They use adiabatic gas coolers on their refrigeration systems. Basically there is a perpetually wet piece of media that air runs through before it gets to the refrigeration coils. By running through that wet media you precool the air basically down to the current dewpoint by evaporating water and therefore you’re cooling the refrigeration coils with colder air which leads to more efficient opperation and reduces the size of the gas coolers required. From what I’ve seen a lot of these datacenters are also switching to CO2 based refirgeration systems which are generally better except the low critical temp of CO2 mean that their efficiency starts to drop quickly once the ambient temp gets much above 80F. Using adiabatic coolers mostly removes that shortfall.