People with far more knowledge about this: when a data center “uses” water, what happens to it? Does the act of cooling servers with water “use up” the water or can it be cycled back into the water system? And if it is theoretically possible for it to be cycled back into the system as opposed to being dumped like sewer water, why isn’t it?
They use evaporative cooling systems. The water absorbs the heat, turns into water vapor, and is vented into the air. In theory I assume it could be collected, but that would require a lot more post processing to cool it back down or compress it to get back to liquid for.
Most high rises have cooling systems. They run ambient temp water to all of the floors, and tenant hvac units cool their server rooms by pumping heat into that water.
It then goes through the loop and gets cooled back down to ambient with large radiator systems outside.
It’s closed loop.
There’s no reason this can’t be applied to datacenters.
I’d imagine DCs are doing it the cheapest way they can. But I think comparing the high rises to a DC doesn’t really work just due to the scale difference and the amount of heat needing removed. I’m sure there’s a way that it could be made something of a closed loop for DCs, but I’m guessing it would be a bit different if a process compared to high rises. I wouldn’t be surprised if a DC removed as much heat as a year of every high rise in NYC in a day or less…
People with far more knowledge about this: when a data center “uses” water, what happens to it? Does the act of cooling servers with water “use up” the water or can it be cycled back into the water system? And if it is theoretically possible for it to be cycled back into the system as opposed to being dumped like sewer water, why isn’t it?
They use evaporative cooling systems. The water absorbs the heat, turns into water vapor, and is vented into the air. In theory I assume it could be collected, but that would require a lot more post processing to cool it back down or compress it to get back to liquid for.
Most high rises have cooling systems. They run ambient temp water to all of the floors, and tenant hvac units cool their server rooms by pumping heat into that water.
It then goes through the loop and gets cooled back down to ambient with large radiator systems outside.
It’s closed loop.
There’s no reason this can’t be applied to datacenters.
I’d imagine DCs are doing it the cheapest way they can. But I think comparing the high rises to a DC doesn’t really work just due to the scale difference and the amount of heat needing removed. I’m sure there’s a way that it could be made something of a closed loop for DCs, but I’m guessing it would be a bit different if a process compared to high rises. I wouldn’t be surprised if a DC removed as much heat as a year of every high rise in NYC in a day or less…