Apparently data centers routinely burn through water at a rate of about 1.9 liters per KWh of energy spent computing. Yet I can 🎮 HARDCORE GAME 🎮 on my hundreds-of-watts GPU for several hours, without pouring any of my Mountain Dew into the computer? Even if the PC is water cooled, the water cooling water stays in the computer, except for exceptional circumstances.
Meanwhile, water comes out of my A/C unit and makes the ground around it all muddy.
How am I running circles around the water efficiency of a huge AI data center, with an overall negative water consumption?
They use evaporative cooling for a chiller plant most likely.
Why would they design around evaporative cooling when water consumption is a problem?
Because they are assholes who hate the environment. The same reason they are using fossil fuels to power their slop centers instead of renewables.
most effective form of heat transfer
Because line must go up
it wasn’t a problem before they started doing this
Because it’s cheap and easy.
sounds like we need to charge them more for water
Instead, WE are paying more for water and power to subsidize them.
because it’s cheap, easy, compact, well understood, and makes numbers look good. number in question is ratio of energy used by entire facility to energy used by silicon only (i forgor how it’s called). alternative is dissipating heat from radiators, but this makes this number like 3. evaporative cooling makes this number closer to 1.2
number in question is ratio of energy used by entire facility to energy used by silicon only (i forgor how it’s called)
taps the fact that electricity is a steam reaction and even if you don’t see it, the electricity you’re using is made by decompressing water into vapor, whether by burning coal through turbines/boiled wind from water sources creating wind power/ even nuclear reactors are often a boiling water reaction going through turbines, creating a net loss of ‘water’ if we don’t have natural condensation utilities to convert ‘air’
that water usually goes through a heat exchanger in a closed loop. there’s a reason most power plants are built by lakes.
also, explain “boiled wind”?
Water exchange above large bodies of water causes thermal dynamic exchanges deliberating speeds of wind currents
that’s not really a big factor.
Yeah because you’ve measured the water intake and export of every large body of water I forgot you’re obviously an expert who knows how to read when a data center takes more water than a town, love your stern optimism, maybe like, wander off somewhere else so you feel important in your views, because it ain’t with me here bud
no, you obviously don’t want people to talk to you. that’s fair.
If it’s truly a closed loop, why do you need a lake, a true closed loop has zero need for local water sources, else there’s some sort of negative that they’re compensating for which, in case of local water sources, there’s not enough infrastructure if any of that water OR HEAT leaves the system faster than it enters
to be the other end of the heat exchanger?
Water is evaporated which takes a lot of energy due to latent heat. Essentially its very energy expensive to boil water.
Server farms use water to cool computers, it’s like water called computers but on a bigger scale
Aircons condense water from the atmosphere the same way water on your shower mirror happens because the mirror is colder than the fog
If you’re familiar with condensation and the rain cycle it should help you understand further
It’s used like sweating. We lose heat by havibg water evaporate off our skin. Right now get warm water and put it on your arm, then blow on it. It gets cold until it is fully evaporated. For water to change from the liquid to the gaseeous phase it needs energy. Think like water molecules are holding hands in a liquid. If one of them wants to come free and fly through the air it needs to somehow get the energy to break free from the grip of the others first. When water evaporates from your arm it tales this energy in the form of heat. It turns heat and uses it to get to the gaseous phase. As long as there is water on your arm it can be cooled that way.
That’s what data centers do as well. They take water to cool their processors and the let part of it evaporate into the air. That way the parts of the water that remain are like your arm - the get cool quickly.
It’s very effective. But if you live in a small town and next door there’s a massive datacenter that takes out all the groundwater and basically just boils it until it disappears, you might get angry after a while.
I once read of a data company that had their servers pretty far north and that it was cheaper to send people there to control it than it was to cool it. Basically used a ventilation system that took the outside air
