Data center water usage remains hidden
Data center water usage remains hidden
We don’t know how much water data centers use. We just know it’s a lot
We don’t know how much water data centers use. We just know it’s a lot
This article is two years old.
How did I completely miss that date. Oh my gosh. Good catch!
That's interesting, I've never thought of data centers using water before, but it sounds like they use it for evaporative cooling. Wouldn't that mean the water's not really "lost" so much as it's returned to the environment?
I saw a video recently about the trouble with desalination (turning salt water to fresh water) is that it takes a lot of energy to evaporate the water. Sounds like some smart people need to get together and start cooling data centers with salt water and turning it into fresh water as a byproduct.
Running salt water through any kind of cooling system is going to cause huge problems.
Salt is corrosive. Metal will degrade rapidly from salt water running through it.
Why would a data center need to continously consume water to cool itself? Leaks?
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.