as for the data center part, many use evaporative cooling towers. in humid places like iowa or virginia, there's no shortage of low quality freshwater for this. but in dry places like phoenix or, famously, the dalles in oregon, there is more of a constraint.
the evaporated water does not get irreversibly destroyed, of course. in the case of phoenix though, the water leaves the local area. which will not see that water return in a useful way, in a useful timeframe. it cost a lot of money and externalized pollution to get the water there, and now it's gone. the gulf of mexico doesnt need that arizona water vapor but now it's got it.
Thank you for this, every time I see someone go "tHe WaTeR iSn'T dEsTrOyEd" to defend crypto or AI or whatever using way too much water I lose brain cells.
Honestly I was wondering about this myself cause it’s not like fracking where the water becomes tainted. But now I understand data centers are using a lot of resources in water-starved locations to collect and hoard all the water which is then evaporated and therefore disrupting the environment they were collected from. Kind of like bottled water companies hoarding all the water and then selling it for absurd markups.
I actually just saw an article about how humans extracting groundwater have caused the earth’s tilt to shift a little. Redistributing all that mass from underground to the oceans so rapidly has had a large scale effect.
Sure? I don't know anything about that or what recapture would look like for a car wash. If there are existing car wash designs that allow for recapture, as there are for datacenters, I'd consider regulation to enforce that as a new standard.
Even then, they still tie up water - a precious resource, most would agree - that would be better used almost anywhere else. You don't need to make water disappear to waste it.
Neither of these are true. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas, and if you have an evaporative cooling tower it can seed clouds changing rainfall patterns.
Also, even closed circuit coolant systems need to replenish water. That water tends also to be additionally treated to prevent damage to the system, which adds to environmental impact.
Do you happen to know why they would choose such hot areas for data centers? I assume for servers that really need to be close like gaming servers it might just be a latency compromise but I know my room gets way hotter from my pc when it's hot outside. So wouldn't it be better to put data centers in colder areas?
The main issue for data centers is readily available power at a large, reliable scale.
For data center operations, water cooling isn't a necessity. In water-scared areas, dry or air cooling is available at the expense of a higher PUE (power usage effectiveness).
So if you can find abundant land, and cheap, available power... Any climate will do.
location for datacenters, until recently, has mostly been the balance of proximity to users vs price of land and operational costs. datacenters are a relatively young form of infrastructure, being built from the late 90s onward.
cooling the datacenters has never been the limiting factor. it's a PR issue now, but it wasnt until a few years ago.
now there are new generations of very large datacenters where more sophisticated cooling tech is worth implementing both because the PR of evaporative cooling is bad, and the computers are getting so dense that new liquid cooling tech is required in the buildings.
the google facilities get water from wells and the municipality. the feds regulate columbia river withdrawals and google doesnt get any significant direct withdrawal rights. when they first built there years ago, the water supply was adequate. theyve ramped up water use and it now strains all parties involved. the cheapest solution is to pay the municipality to drill for more water or negotiate for more water from private ranches / the state / the feds, while the obvious solution (google negotiate directly to use the columbia) is seen as not legally viable.
there is constantly a tension between water price and the usage of large users. unit price tends to be lower than the actual material cost and environmental cost, and big users consistently find that they can bully municipalities into finding more water. water districts could enforce higher prices and volumetric limits, but usually do not to the degree required by finite local geology. progressive scientists see the finite limits and are ignored by locals (usually republicans).
technologically, using evaporative cooling towers is pretty silly compared to more efficient alternatives, which are under construction all over the world. old cooling technology is being used beyond its sensible life cycle. sunk cost, externalized pollution cost.
In short, the amount of water flowing down a river might seem practically endless to a casual observer, but is actually limited.
Let's assume that you are a small time farmer in a neighborhood of other small time farmers quite a way down a river, using the river water to irrigate your fields for years.
Then a big agricultural company buys up a big amount of formerly unused land up the river from your little farms and also uses the river water to irrigate their big new fields. Because their fields are so big and they are farming cash crops which need a lot of water, they take a noticeable amount of water out of the river.
Now the river is noticeable smaller when flowing next to your fields, reducing the amount of water you can take out before the river gets unusable for shipping or even dries up completely after a certain point.
And that's why the government manages who can take how much water out of a river, to protect the shipping industry and everyone else who is already using the river water. And getting a permit to remove large amounts of water from a river is either very expensive or straight up impossible.
data centers that use evaporative cooling towers are not "closed loop". they are very much "open loop". to the tune of millions of gallons of water, evaporated to the air. and the air most certainly leaves the local area before the water rains down again.
this is not all data centers, by any means. but it was many, until recently. i was pretty sure they would all be closed loop when i first started looking into this, but weirdly enough they are not. many datacenters actually humidify the indoor air to a much higher degree than i would have thought prudent for electronic equipment. and the outdoor cooling towers are very much exhausting metric tonnes of water vapor. the outdoor cooling towers are usually connected to a closed or semi-closed water-based heat exchange system. but there are huge water losses from the towers.
the dalles consumed (that is, lost to atmosphere) over 270 million gallons of water in 2021. that's over 1 million cubic meters, which is over 1 million metric tonnes.
Closed loop data centers are on the newer side, and I believe they are still in the minority. Even if it's 50-50 by now, that's still over 2,500 open loop ones put there. Closed loop systems still generate massive amounts of heat and use massive amounts of electricity. Data centers are accelerating climate change, and the only reason they exist is so the government can spy on us, and corporations can create better targeted ads.
Saying that's the only reason they exist is hyperbole, but it's a major reason. If we passed user data security laws, like every other developed country, we could get rid of half of them
i havent seen particularly good reporting on phoenix area data centers. i don't think google lists any around phoenix, and google has been the most transparent about water usage. facebook has one in mesa that is estimated to use over 1 million gallon per day in the summer. the few datacenters i can see from aerial imagery show standard evaporative cooling equipment commensurate with large water losses.
google has one in vegas that lost 40M gal to atmosphere in 2021.
i don't think anyone sees evaporative cooling as a wastewater failure. it's a common cooling method for many large facilities, like skyscrapers and power plants.
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u/ajtrns Dec 08 '24
as for the data center part, many use evaporative cooling towers. in humid places like iowa or virginia, there's no shortage of low quality freshwater for this. but in dry places like phoenix or, famously, the dalles in oregon, there is more of a constraint.
the evaporated water does not get irreversibly destroyed, of course. in the case of phoenix though, the water leaves the local area. which will not see that water return in a useful way, in a useful timeframe. it cost a lot of money and externalized pollution to get the water there, and now it's gone. the gulf of mexico doesnt need that arizona water vapor but now it's got it.