Data Centers Work To Reduce Water Usage

miller60 writes "As data centers get larger, they are getting thirstier as well. A large server farm can use up to 360,000 gallons of water a day in its cooling systems, a trend that has data center operators looking at ways to reduce their water use and impact on local water utilities. Google says two of its data centers now are "water self-sufficient." The company has built a water treatment plant at its new facility in Belgium, allowing the data center to rely on water from a nearby industrial canal. Microsoft chose San Antonio for a huge data center so it could use the local utility's recycled water ('gray water') service for the 8 million gallons it will use each month."

Comments

Idea

[YayaY]

They should use closed circuit cooling system.

Re:Idea

[h4rr4r]

That costs a lot more up front and depending on how much water you are using may never be worth it.

Re:Idea

[thhamm]

it's always a closed circuit. just depends on the timescale.

Re:Idea

[YayaY]

Then we should charge them for the water they uses. That would make it worthwhile. The use of grey water would also be OK, I just have a problem with the use of drinking water for cooling.

Re:Idea

[iminplaya]

Exactly! The water is going nowhere. There's just as much now as there was 4.5 billion years ago. And there's plenty of it bubbling up from deep underground we haven't even touched. Christ! We pipe oil 800 miles across Alaska. Do they mean to say we can't do the same for ocean water? In fact I thought it might be one of the reasons to just float the damn things, or better yet sink 'em so they are surrounded by nice cool water. As always, it's about the damn money.

Re:Idea

[h4rr4r]

1. They do pay for the water
2. Why do you care what they do with water they pay for? I would not care if they used bottled water to cool their data center. The water is not destroyed, in fact it is still drinkable water, just a little warmer.

Re:Idea

[Walt Dismal]

It is a scientific fact that the blood of H1B workers makes a far better cooling material than water. As soon as CEOs realize this, several problems will be solved. Better and cheaper outsourced cooling, fatter wallets for politicians, and far better code.

Re:Idea

[Shadow of Eternity]

Shouldn't it be reasonably easy to just pump water around underground for a while to cool it off before running it through the pipes? Or in coastal areas just suck some up from really deep and send it right back down again.

Re:Idea

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'm sure that they do pay something for water; but it may or may not have any relation at all to its actual cost.

For a confusing tangle of historical and political reasons, allocation of water rights is often deeply perverse. In some cases, you'll get a situation analogous to IP address (mis)allocation, where a number of entities received enormous grants of water rights many decades ago. In other cases, you'll have radically different rates across user class(frequently, agriculture ends up having access to astonishingly cheap water, compared to everybody else, and compared to the cost of producing it). In other cases, you'll have a situation where the level of water use is only maintained by sucking the aquifers dry at a rate far beyond that of replenishment, which works like a charm, up until it blows up in your face.

Because of the often dysfunctional state of pricing, uses that are flagrantly unsuitable to the location and climate often end up happening, because they don't bear anything close to the real costs of what they are doing. I can't speak for YayaY; but my concern would be not what they do with the water they pay for, they can do whatever they like, but for whether or not the price that they are paying accurately signals the cost of consuming the resource, or whether they end up imposing an externality on everybody around them.

Re:Idea

[geekoid]

I care because water is a limited supply.

SO if someone started buying all the water rights and hording them, it would be bad.

In the context of this story, I am not concerned.

Re:Idea

[supernova_hq]

That's called geothermic cooling. It is starting to be used quite a bit in rural areas and I'm surprised that they haven't started using it in industrial areas. Maybe it's due to the amount of water needed.

Re:Idea

[supernova_hq]

Wow, I always forget that not everybody lives in BC. Other than dry-spells, we have an almost unlimited water supply.

Re:Idea

[h4rr4r]

Yeah, I can see lake Erie from my office. People say water shortage and I just think they are mad.

Re:Idea

[maxume]

Probably. Residential systems are pretty expensive and require a fair amount of ground contact (which is part of what drives the cost); industrial quantities would probably require enormous fields, to the point of impracticality.

Re:Idea

[jhw539]

It doesn't really work for a couple reasons. First, heat doesn't get destroyed in the ground or wicked away (unless you have an underground river, which changes the whole story), it is stored. This is awesome for a building that pumps heat into the ground in the summer and then needs to pull it back out in the winter, but sucks for a datacenter that is pumping out MW of heat 8760 hours a year. Second, massive quantities of heat. A rule of thumb would be 200 feet of well per 3.5 kW of cooling. A modest datacenter is around 15 MW of waste heat, so you need 860,000 linear feet of well (with double that much piping making a U down each well). And after a year you're screwed anyhow because of issue #1.

Re:Idea

[Shadow of Eternity]

and just sucking up really cold deep water and then spitting it right back out again?

Re:Idea

[aaarrrgggh]

Significantly less efficient, especially if the relative humidity is low. (Incidentally, what is generally termed closed circuit just separates the condenser water from the cooling tower water, and still has equal evaporation.)

Hopefully we will see more controls that optimize for water and electricity efficiency, but it is great to see people using grey water for cooling tower make-up... as long as they are not upwind from me!

But, if you could distill the water with waste heat and solar, it might get interesting.

Re:Idea

[jordie]

Wow, I always forget that not everybody lives in BC. Other than dry-spells, we have an almost unlimited water supply.

In Vancouver BC we're not allowed to dump the water for cooling, the city has cracked down on data centres. We have to use a closed loop system.

Don't forget they listed it as 360k gallons, that's 1.36 million litres for ONE server farm. At that rate it wouldn't take us long to blow through our natural sources of water.

Re:Idea

[jbengt]

The water is treated with (usually nasty) chemicals to prevent biological contamination, scale buildup, and corrosion.
The cooling effect comes from water that is evaporated - that's about half the water usage they're talking about.
What's not evaporated is recirculated, the treatment chemicals and contaminants get concentrated by the evaporation, so some of it is bled off into the sewer and fresh water is added - that's about another half of the water usage.
It is definitely NOT drinkable; just ask Erin Brokovich.

Re:Idea

[0100010001010011]

Why waste it under ground? I know it's a 'socialist' idea. But heat homes with it in the winter. Use it to generate free hot water for a whole neighborhood. Hell you could even charge for it (just make it cheaper than heating naturally).

As the price of energy goes up, the whole idea of individualism is going to have to end. Nearly every apartment building I see has an individual electric heat and individual AC units, while every office building has one massive AC unit on the top. I don't know how other universities do it, but Purdue has one massive boiler (powerplant), ever building on campus is heated and gets got water from this one central point for efficiency's sake.

Build a neighborhood around a data center (it's not like it's a NIMBY problem). Use the data center cooling system to heat the surrounding neighborhood. At worst, use the heat to run a sterling engine. (It's "waste" heat so it's not like you care about efficiency)

Re:Idea

[jhw539]

It's a lot of sucking to get 12,000 gpm of really deep cold water up and put right back in. If you can do that, you're in the rare situation of sitting on top a subterranean river. Which can work great, but why not just build next to a surface river or lake?

Re:Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Because of the often dysfunctional state of pricing, uses that are flagrantly unsuitable to the location and climate often end up happening, because they don't bear anything close to the real costs of what they are doing. I can't speak for YayaY; but my concern would be not what they do with the water they pay for, they can do whatever they like, but for whether or not the price that they are paying accurately signals the cost of consuming the resource, or whether they end up imposing an externality on everybody around them.

This has a simple solution, like most problems if you care to cut the political bull out of it. Charge them a constant "per unit" rate for their peak load.

Use 100 gallons a day? $0.10 a gallon. Use 1,000 gallons a day? $0.15... Use 1,000,000 gallons a day? Charge them $1.00 a gallon. It's still cheaper than gasoline and works fine for moderate users.

They don't want to pay $1,000,000.00 for the 1,000,000 gallons/day they use? They buy it from someone else, using someone else's delivery system, not my tax subsidized tubes. It will increase the demand and thus viability for desalinization and water recycling. The water from the sinks in an office building can be used for this, they don't need to used potable water for everything...

Re:Idea

[davolfman]

I think he was talking salt water in this case. I think that's doable and I'm pretty sure that's what the San Onofre nuclear power plant uses. They certainly don't have steam towers.

Re:Idea

[snero3]

Voice of reason, so rare nowa days.

Re:Idea

[lgw]

The suppy of water for cooling is unlimited, thought there are issues of local scarcity.

The majority of all water "consumed" is used in power generation.

Of the remaining piece, the majority is used for agriculture.

The remaining non-power, non-agriculture slice is pretty small, and is mostly home irrigation, though industrial use like this is non-trivial. Still not worth worrying about in the scheme of things, but not totally insanely fucking pointless like conserving the water used in showers and toilets. Yeah, lets significantly impact quality of life for a 1% water savings - man I hate hippies.

Re:Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

The water is going nowhere. There's just as much now as there was 4.5 billion years ago.

Tell that to Mars.

Re:Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you meant downwind from you. Upwind would be where you cannot smell it, downwind is where it blows in your face.

Re:Idea

[AngelofDeath-02]

On the other hand, when this water gets re-processed, the facility needs to add that much less chemicals to treat the water in order to maintain chloramine levels. If they use chlorine, though - that will evaporate with the water. This is true for anything that a water treatment plant adds, these levels are monitored and a data centers impact will be pretty constant.

Anything else that might be in the water supply that gets concentrated due to not evaporating was already there in the first place and isn't being added by anyone but us.

In short, you are probably right that you wouldn't want to drink the water coming out of the data center, but once it cycles back through the waste water treatment center it's just as drinkable as it ever was.

Re:Idea

[Entropy2016]

What makes you think waste water treatment centers bother treating water with respect to chemicals that may or may not be present in the water? They'll treat it for biological contaminants, adjust the pH and compensate for whatever chemicals they add to it, but I doubt most of them treat the water for unknown chemical contaminants. To treat a chemical contaminant, you must know what it is. It's not like there are all-purpose chemicals you can throw at these sort of things.

Re:Idea

[F�an�ro]

Heat does not dissipate fast underground, but there is no way pumping heat underground in the summer will have any measurable change remaining in winter, is there?
If you do it on a city wide scale maybe, but even then I doubt it.
Heat pumps rely on the fact that the underground is generally warmer in winter and colder in summer than the surface.

Re:Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Rather than adding treated water to the concentrated treated water, couldn't they just add fresh water, and not have to bleed any of it into the sewer?

Re:Idea

[AngelofDeath-02]

Because nothing will be in that water that wasn't already in there from the treatment center, except maybe some extra copper if they are using copper heatpipes or something. There's nothing additional to treat, and nothing to be any more harmful on reintroduction than it was already. If it's something they add, it's something they monitor. The only things that would accumulate from halving and reintroducing the water into the system is stuff they would add, and thus monitor.

Essentially, in the scenario listed by the post I was replying to:

Water with chemicals x y and z is provided by the water center.
The water evaporates, leaving concentrated doses of say, x and y, but z evaporates.
Water with high doses of x and y are undrinkable.

I say, it doesn't matter. Since x, y, and z are monitored.
Highly concentrated water will be introduced into the water, and will be tested for. The dosage will thus be adjusted accordingly. Those random chemicals you're referring to are irrelevant because they aren't arbitrarily added by the water being processed at a waste water treatment center. Therefore, they aren't going to be any more concentrated than they would have been before. If anything, they are added by us pissing whatever drugs we've taken into our toilets. (which water from a data center is unlikely to have any more of than it did already.)

You can't even really complain about the frequency of testing because the load of the data center is going to be pretty constant. Consistent levels of chloramine, in my example, will be returned to the treatment center. (Btw, chloramine is Chlorine and Ammonia, and is used in place of chlorine to prevent bad stuff from growing in the water.) This stuff is used because it is more stable than chlorine and will /not/ evaporate. It will be stuff like this that survives the return trip into the water system at concentrated levels.

Maybe I am missing something about waste water treatment, and what chemicals are involved, but meh.

Re:Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Even better, they should use NO cooling at all. Why? Because the need for cooling means they have heat they need to get rid of. What's heat? Energy that was wasted. They brought in electricity to do some work and instead of it actually doing that, it made some thing warm that now needs cooling. So what they're really doing is wasting energy in the form of heat.

Perhaps they could reduce their need for cooling if they reduced the amount of energy they waste. That saves energy, saves water, saves cooling and so on. And yes this is doable. Google is already famous for running their data centers hotter than most IT shops, but still, heat is wasted energy.

Another horrible energy waster that people encounter every day is the internal combustion engine. All that water cooling system and radiator and even most of the function of the exhaust system are working to get rid of excess heat which is never used to help propel the cars. It's blown out the pipe or run through the radiator for air cooling. All that heat is waste energy. A lot of the gas you burn goes not to move the car but is simply wasted out as heat. Cars would be incredibly more efficient if all that heat was being used for something. Imagine a Peltier under the hood soaking up waste heat to charge a battery or something. We just throw that energy away right now.

Re:Idea

[pipingguy]

Oooh, cool! A totally true statement that is totally irrelevant to solving problems that exist in the present. Are you one of those guys that are planning for us to get off the planet soon because the current human infestation/the environment has become such a problem?

Re:Idea

[vivian]

They should use closed circuit cooling system.

Better yet - if the water consumption of all those server rooms is water that is evaporated and lost, why not re-condense it to pure water and sell the stuff back to the utilities? So the waste heat from all those server rooms is actually being used to turn (possibly quite literally) crappy water into stuff that's as pure as rain water?

The additional advantage is that with that system, it's actually good if the server rooms are burning throuhg more water - it's producing even more pure water, and the airconditioners dont have to re-cool the hot pure water all the way back down again - they can just take in more new crappy water.

Re:Idea

[pipingguy]

Babblespeak like this is the reason that access to fresh water will be the next "environmental crisis" after Global Climate Change has faded from the newspaper headlines/TV and peoples' minds. Check back with me after the 10 year cycle when we're either drowning or dying of thirst.

Re:Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know how other universities do it, but Purdue has one massive boiler (powerplant), ever building on campus is heated and gets got water from this one central point for efficiency's sake.

In a lot of (northern) European cities, the entire urban area is piped into a huge district heat system. For example most of the metropolitan Helsinki area is wired into one system. In the winter especially, the electric plants in the area can dump their heat into the district heating network, giving residents cheap heating and hot water, and turning that 35% efficient boiler (electricity) into a nearly 100% efficient one (electricity + heat). Its brilliant.

Re:Idea

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

What part of what I said is babblespeak?

Water rights/prices being dysfunctional: This is a simple matter of historical fact. Water prices and rights allocations are a mess of grandiose grandfathered claims, virtually arbitrary cost differences between user segments and locations, and all sorts of hidden subsidies here and there. I don't like it, and I don't think that it's a good idea; but there it is.

Groundwater extraction having the potential to end quite badly: Aquifers are quite close to being a classic "commons" in the "the tragedy of the" sense. Anybody with land on top of one can, quite cheaply, shove a tube down and start pumping. Since most(though not all) aquifers recharge quite slowly compared to their total stored volume, you can easily overdraw quite severely for a fair length of time; before hitting the aquifer's limits and being restricted to extracting at the recharge rate. Worse, overdrawing can reduce the porosity of the soil, and permanently reduce the recharge rate.

Occurrence of uneconomic activity: This is just basic orthodox econ. People will, more or less, behave rationally to maximize their expected outcome, according to the market conditions around them. If price signals are wildly dysfunctional, and/or fail to capture relevant externalities, peoples' rational, self-interested decisions can be expected to produce suboptimal outcomes. If farmers can get water for peanuts because of subsidised pipelines and water rights compromises dating back to the frontier days, then they'll do manifestly suboptimal things like growing alfalfa in the desert. If groundwater is treated as a commons, it will be overexploited, just as various other commons throughout history have been.

It's funny. By the look of your sig, you'd be the first to oppose any scheme that involves pretending that money is unlimited, and doesn't need to be worried about. And yet, when I say the same thing about a different commodity, it is "babblespeak". This seems to be a surprisingly common phenomenon. The people who are first in line to be hard headed realists, boldly facing the facts of economic scarcity, attacking policies based on exorbitant borrowing and capricious spending, and so forth; are, oddly often, the same ones who attack the same concerns about other finite resources as some sort of creeping enviro-commie socialism.

Heck, scarcity sucks, I wish it weren't that way; but that doesn't change the fact. Overpumping an aquifer is stupid, in hard economic terms, in exactly the same fashion as overusing a line of credit. Policies that promote the malpricing and inefficient use of water are no less dangerous than the ones that promote the malpricing and inefficient use of capital, and, indeed, they are quite similar structurally.

Re:Idea

[jhw539]

Yes, if you grab surface water (as it commonly done by electrical generation plants, as you note) it is a fine idea, but it is not as much of a home run as one would think. Piping is frightfully expensive and the maintainable can be a pain.

Re:Idea

[jhw539]

I have a 20,000 sf building in Missouri where the ground temperature swings 20F over the heating to cooling season. The ground is a thermal storage medium. You can do the numbers on it's thermal capacitance and thermal resistivity and get pretty close estimate of how quickly it will heat and if it is an appropriate approach. Note that I am assuming vertical bore systems. Horitzontal bore systems are much more closely coupled to above ground weather and serve more to average out the diurnal swings on a scale of weeks rather than average out the seasonal swings like a vertical bore setup. Ground coupled systems do not work for cooling only applications, unless they are actually serving as a heat exchanger to an underground moving body of water. (Or you have something really funky going on like season snow pack storage above the well field.)

Re:Idea

[jbengt]

I believe that there's a misunderstanding about who's treating what.
The cooling plants add chemicals to treat the water so that it won't foul the cooling system (and chlorine can sometimes be detrimental to the system). This is not wastewater treatment or drinking water treatment. Many of the chemicals contain things like molybdenum, chromium, phosphates. Though there are now more regulations in place than there used to be about what you can use and what you can discharge, making sure the water is OK to discharge directly into the ecosystem, let alone for it to be drinkable as h4rr4r supposed, would take a conscious effort. And conscious efforts about such things are uncommon.

Re:Idea

[pipingguy]

The people who are first in line to be hard headed realists

Nice reply, I appreciate the time you spent composing it. I work in engineering, we know how to get stuff done. We also know when to not waste time because political concerns will negate our efforts. Does that make sense to you? I know this is a kind of curt response to your thoughts, and I apologize for that.

Re:Idea

[Critical Facilities]

(Incidentally, what is generally termed closed circuit just separates the condenser water from the cooling tower water, and still has equal evaporation.)

Actually, this is not correct. In a closed loop system, the chilled/condenser water is sent to a heat exchanger which is incorporated with a Direct Expansion (DX) chiller. At no time is the water exposed to the atmosphere and thus subjected to evaporation. This method uses more electricity, and lacks some of the energy efficiency of an Open Loop (particularly due to the inability to use a 'water side economizer' cycle), but is still an effective method of cooling a data center. See here for an example.

Re:Idea

[Jurily]

That costs a lot more up front and depending on how much water you are using may never be worth it.

You know the world is fucked up when drinking water has a price tag.

Re:Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know whether it's the rule everywhere, but at my lab, we've been told you are legally required to use a closed circuit cooling system. It requires more equipment than just running water down the drain, but violating the law tends to be more expensive.

Re:Idea

[SoupGuru]

Cadillac Desert is a great book on the history of water use in the western US. Water is so subsidized that people pay pennies on the dollar that it actually costs to deliver that water. Since the water is so cheap, people are wasteful. Strange things happen, like alfalfa fields (consumes a lot of water) in a desert.

I think people would be surprised if what they pay for water reflected the true cost.

Re:Idea

[Dextrously]

2. Why do you care what they do with water they pay for? I would not care if they used bottled water to cool their data center. The water is not destroyed, in fact it is still drinkable water, just a little warmer.

If you've seen some of the sump basins that the waste water flows into, you wouldn't say that. :)

Re:Idea

[Alastor187]

it's always a closed circuit. just depends on the timescale.

In thermodynamics a closed-system doesn't have any mass transfer across the system boundary. If the data center is using evaporative cooling which transfers water vapor (mass) out of the data center (system) it is an open system.

Re:Idea

[afidel]

Huh? Do you think there is no cost to take water from a lake or river and treat it to modern levels of cleanliness? In most places people inhabit you are free to get whatever surface water is available, but you probably won't live too long. Water treatment and the eradication of water born infections was a major part of what makes modern lifespans possible.

Re:Idea

[paulgrant]

Read on Thermal Wastewater

Re:Idea

[aaarrrgggh]

See Closed Circuit Cooling Tower. DX is "closed circuit", but nobody refers to it that way, as obviously the refrigerant must stay in a closed circuit.

Re:Idea

[badkarmadayaccount]

They don't dissolve chlorine gas, genius. They use special chlorine salts.

Re:Generate more water

[Anonymous Coward]

turn your faglisp off and stop shaking your stick

sooooo ?

[quickOnTheUptake]

Not trying to flame, but honestly who cares how much water flows through a data center? Is the water having toxic waste added? Is the water being destroyed so it is creating a drought in the area? Are thousands of gallons an hour of boiling water being pumped back into the local stream and changing the ecology?
It seems to me that most uses of water are pretty benign, it gets used for some purpose and eventually it all goes back into wild where it naturally get recycled back into the local watertable. Is there any environmentalist out there who can enlighten me on why the water "consumption" of a data center (or any other major plant) is an issue?

Re:sooooo ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhap's it's more a fiscal cost issue- all that water does start costing money if it's nice, human consumable, water.

Re:sooooo ?

[h4rr4r]

I believe one concern is merely that water companies may not be able to handle the load, which would mean they would upgrade. I am not really sure what is wrong with that though.

Re:sooooo ?

[Quothz]

Not trying to flame, but honestly who cares how much water flows through a data center?

Whomever has to pay the water bill cares.

Re:sooooo ?

[Kelson]

honestly who cares how much water flows through a data center?

I take it you don't live in an area facing a water shortage?

Re:sooooo ?

[geekoid]

it's expensive, very, very expensive.
It can be hard to get a rate hike to cover it.

Re:sooooo ?

[h4rr4r]

Then perhaps you guys should raise water prices?
That might make an incentive for folks to stop using so much.

Re:sooooo ?

[Chabo]

I'm pretty sure it should be "whoever" in this case, especially since "who" makes sense in your parent's post, and "whom" doesn't.

[/pedant]

Re:sooooo ?

[h4rr4r]

How is it hard to raise the price?
In fact just doing that would influence folks not to waste it.

Re:sooooo ?

[Kelson]

That might make an incentive for folks to stop using so much.

Yeah, it might prompt people to do something like try to cut down on how much water their data center uses.

Re:sooooo ?

[Cylix]

When you consume millions of gallons of water it's not something you disclose after hooking up to the main.

So it's a negotiated setup between two companies with the intention to reserve X amount.

It's like any other industries that needs resources to operate and for the most part it is harmless.

The concern I believe is the reliance and need on the great sums of water. Thus there is a good deal of focus on reducing cost and usage while maintaining the same level of performance. Essentially, an increase in efficiency is sought.

Re:sooooo ?

[ShieldW0lf]

Perhaps they ought to put their data centers in the Arctic instead of in California. Seems pretty obvious...

Re:sooooo ?

[geekoid]

that doesn't work as well as one might think. It becomes a very messy political issue.

Add to that, people need water to live then you realize that there is a pretty fixed price point.

Re:sooooo ?

[EvanED]

That might make an incentive for folks to stop using so much.

I'm sure all those people who live in $CITY_WITH_DATA_CENTER and have no decision-making abilities there, but would still be affected by rising prices, would get right on that.

Re:sooooo ?

[marco.antonio.costa]

People DO need water to live. Now HOW much water they need to live isn't fixed, so when water becomes scarce the price should go up to signal to people that they need to save.

Prices are not just tags, they're the most important data in a market economy.

Re:sooooo ?

[supernova_hq]

I fail to see why the datacenter is "consuming" water instead of just "using" it. If they develop standards for the cooling system and have the incoming water passively cool internally filtered water, they should be able to pump the hot water out and back into the water system.

Not only are you re-using the water without the need to re-filter it (assuming companies use safe parts), but if the water companies had any sense, they would use this free "hot" water and have incoming hot water to people homes! Hot water usually isn't consumed anyways (used for showering, washing, etc), so even if a "little bit" of contaminates got in, it wouldn't be a big problem. Just think, you could have an entire city that doesn't need individual hot-water tanks!

Re:sooooo ?

[JO_DIE_THE_STAR_F***]

Yeah because there is a huge IT workforce in the Arctic and lots of others who want to move there from someplace like California.

Currently in Canada you get huge tax breaks if you live in the arctic and company's have to pay huge incentives to get people to work up there. Which usually includes working in rotations such as 3 weeks up there and 2 weeks paid off with free transportation south.

Re:sooooo ?

[DerekLyons]

Not trying to flame, but honestly who cares how much water flows through a data center?

Anyone who cares about their city and it's infrastructure.
 
 

Is there any environmentalist out there who can enlighten me on why the water "consumption" of a data center (or any other major plant) is an issue?

It doesn't take an environmentalist - all it takes is someone familiar with this issues who takes a moment to think.
 
The problem is that the water for many cities and towns comes from aquifers or dams - which rely on rain to replenish. Many of these are already highly strained, even before the load of a data center is placed on them. The water taken from these sources is then treated, which costs money, and again many cities water systems are already strained because of the high capital cost of building new ones. Again, a data center consumes so much water that this just exacerbates the problem.

Re:sooooo ?

[geekoid]

yes it is. It's probably less then they're using, but it is fixed.

Re:sooooo ?

[Wonko the Sane]

And that's why socialism is such a great idea

"Of course I have the right to live in a city even if I can't afford the basic necessities of life in the middle of a desert"

Re:sooooo ?

[jhw539]

Datacenters, like 99% of facilities with large cooling loads, evaporate water to reject the heat. The water comes in and is essentially boiled off through devices called cooling towers. You reject 1000 btus per pound of water evaporated - there is no more efficient way to reject heat. Not coincidently (if you believe in evolution), your body rejects heat the exact same way.

Re:sooooo ?

[samriel]

I don't see why they couldn't just start using gray water for their cooling systems. After all, nobody is going to be drinking it; it's just going to be pumped through some copper tubes and maybe across a processor. That would a) reduce the use of human-drinkable water being used for cooling and b) very likely lower the cost of coolant water for these datacenters.

Re:sooooo ?

[bakuun]

Actually, similar systems are in place in most decently large Swedish cities, called "distant heat" (i.e. heat that comes from a distance). However, instead of being used for showering, it is used to heat the buildings (i.e. circulated through radiators). It is very efficient, and any large nearby facility that produces heat can be hooked up to the system.

It's a win-win situation - residents who want warm homes get access to heating, and corporations who want to cool their datacenters/furnaces/whatever get access to cooling. It's both cheap and environmentally very sound.

Re:sooooo ?

[SuperQ]

So you really don't seem to understand how datacenters are using water.

Most of the cooling they use is Evaporative. They use the thermal property of evaporation to reduce the temperature hot return water. This is how they consume water, they just evaporate millions of gallons into the air.

http://www.google.com/corporate/green/datacenters/summit.html

Most large buildings do this. You will see this type of cooling on any building larger than a small office. When I worked at the university, I would go up to the roof of a 20 story campus building that had huge 5 meter wide/tall cooling towers to evaporate water to cool the whole building complex.

Re:sooooo ?

[supernova_hq]

Yes, but if they move the hot water back into the grid and take in more cold water, they no longer need the evaporators.

Re:sooooo ?

[supernova_hq]

See my other post above regarding evaporation...

Re:sooooo ?

[aaarrrgggh]

You are using evaporation for cooling. Unless your relative humidity is already very high, the water isn't going to be precipitated out in the local region. If the relative humidity is that high, then you are better using air-cooled chillers rather than water-cooled chillers from an efficiency perspective.

The other issue is that almost all water in the US is treated as drinking water. This requires significant energy and additives to sterilize and remove suspended substances. Water prices don't always reflect the true cost of supply due to its nature.

Ultimately, it's entropy. If you have waste heat, it has to go somewhere.

Re:sooooo ?

[plover]

<Sarcasm> Yeah because there is a huge IT workforce in the Arctic and lots of others who want to move there from someplace like California. </Sarcasm>

So what? You get a couple of Inuit electricians to run cables for you and drive the forklifts. The rest of the work is done over the tubes. At that point, it's JBOC -- Just a Building full Of Computers.

The best bet is to put it as close to its energy sources as possible, in the least humanly desirable geographic location -- siting it on a reclaimed Superfund dump in the middle of the Arctic next to an oil well and refinery sounds pretty effective to me.

Re:sooooo ?

[Quothz]

I'm pretty sure it should be "whoever" in this case

You're absolutely right. Just an artifact of editing my response while distracted.

Re:sooooo ?

[mikael]

Perhaps they should use the data center as a means of heating up water for the staff rooms, or have a feedback pipe back to the water mains supply.

Re:sooooo ?

[Fulcrum of Evil]

It doesn't take an environmentalist - all it takes is someone familiar with this issues who takes a moment to think.

In the current climate, that makes you a commie environmentalist.

Re:sooooo ?

[Anonymous Coward]

These data centers must be huge. How about more smaller data centers to distribute the problem around? Rural areas could use a boost to the economy, not to mention some real broadband...

Re:sooooo ?

[sjames]

In many areas where suitable drinking water is in short supply, there is already rationing such that watering lawns, filling swimming pools, and washing cars is strictly forbidden. Local governments may be hesitant to order datacenters to shut their A/C down, but may start charging them enough to encourage alternative cooling methods.

It comes out of the common reservoir but that's not where it falls again (eventually) as rain. In other words, it doesn't destroy the water, it just takes it from where it's in short supply and ultimately deposits it again where it is plentiful.

The people depending on that water would sure appreciate it if they stopped doing that.

Re:sooooo ?

[jhw539]

Evaporating a single gallon of water rejects about 8330 btus. If you want to schlup water in and out of the system, you have to move about 50 gallons through to get the same cooling as that single gallon. You can do it, but only in rare situations. I've only pulled it off once, and that was for a water municipality who literally owned the water stream at the point we hooked in a side car loop setup to reject heat. Might pull it off once more if we can convince the water company it's OK as long as we tap their feed line prior to the treatment plant. But usually there is no appropriately sized water stream near the datacenter site and, even if there is, water companies freak out about you injecting anything back into their mains (backflow preventors are mandatory on all connections to their mains).

Re:sooooo ?

[jbengt]

Not trying to flame . . .

I'll try to answer

Is the water having toxic waste added?

Usually a lot of chemicals are added to try to prevent corrosion, scale build-up, and biological contamination. Regulations are getting more restrictive about what can be added, but I still wouldn't recommend swimming in it.

Is the water being destroyed so it is creating a drought in the area?

Yes, so to speak. About half the "destruction" is from evaporation, making it unavailable to the system it was taken from. About half is from blowdown, which is typically sent to the sanitary sewer with all sorts of contaminants in it.

Are thousands of gallons an hour of boiling water being pumped back into the local stream and changing the ecology

Not boiling, but if the waste water is treated enough to dump directly back into the local stream, it will be around 85F, which is much warmer than most streams, and too warm to support the native waterlife. That's why power plants often use up a lot of real estate with cooling ponds for the water to sit in for a while before being reintroduced into a lake or river river.

Re:sooooo ?

[jbengt]

Gray water systems are a good idea, but they're not as easy as you make it sound. (that is, they're expensive)
Gray water has to be collected, filtered, and treated, each step of which is a considerably greater capital expense than the typical connection to the local utility. And those "some copper tubes" it's "just going to be pumped through" are parts of expensive refrigeration equipment that doesn't take well to dirty, corrosive, contaminated, or hard water.

Re:sooooo ?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called evaporation, and while not permanent on a global scale, a large datacenter can deplete local resources.

Re:sooooo ?

[jbengt]

Yes, but if they move the hot water back into the grid and take in more cold water, they no longer need the evaporators.

Yes, and they'll only need about 30 times as much water then!
Not to mention which, I don't want to drink any of that water they put back in the grid after it goes through some faceless company's ill-maintained cooling equipment.
Anyway, you can't just pump fresh water through refrigeration equipment without destroying it from corrosion, scale build up and biological contamination.

Re:sooooo ?

[slashtivus]

That's great if the infrastructure is in place... Otherwise have fun digging up the entire city's streets to every home to install a new insulated hot water pipe.

Many of the older densely populated cities have this, but that is not where data-centers are being built.

It is possible to spend more money / energy costs in trying to re-build all of that than you would save in energy and costs? The terms 'TANSTASAFL' and 'missed opportunity' seem to apply here. (unfortunately)

Re:sooooo ?

[spartacus_prime]

And that's why socialism is such a great idea

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Re:sooooo ?

[Wonko the Sane]

Taxpayers subsidising the cost of water and the government enacting price controls?

If that's not socialistic then what is?

Re:sooooo ?

[spartacus_prime]

Water is an essential service. I don't think you should see anything wrong with your tax dollars going to provide water to your household. Now, if you had to petition the government to let you have X amount of water, THAT would be more socialistic.

Re:sooooo ?

[Wonko the Sane]

Water is an essential service. I don't think you should see anything wrong with your tax dollars going to provide water to your household.

Translation: if I can't afford to pay for my water, then I'm going to make you pay my share for me.

Re:sooooo ?

[Entropy2016]

You have lots of hot water.
You decide to expel it into a nearby stream or lake.
Fish need dissolved oxygen.
Hotter water is less able to keep dissolved gasses in solution (this is basic chemistry).
You just forced all the dissolved oxygen to outgas by raising the temperature of the water.
The fish/organisms suffocate and then decompose.
Decomposition eats up even more dissolved oxygen.
Anaerobic bacteria then take over the affected system.

Now imagine you've introduced an large concentration of anaerobic bacteria into a subterranean aquifer.
Your anaerobic bacteria have colonized the base of the well pipe.
Now imagine you're a city like, oh, San Antonio, where the entire city relies upon a single aquifer. Maybe your water came from that contaminated well head. Maybe not. Are you feeling lucky?

We don't call this sort of stuff thermal pollution just because we like to label any sort of waste/output "pollution". We label it as such because it has negative consequences.

By the way, I live in San Antonio, and we have a couple wells that were (probably still are) contaminated. Imagine a 2 ft diameter pipe going straight into the ground. Near the bottom of it, they had a problem with a several-inch-thick biofilm growing, constricting the pipe's flow (not to mention biologically contaminating it). If you spend a million dollars making a well, and it turns out contaminated and useless, it's a bit of a problem.

Now in this case the cause was (as far as I know) unknown, and unrelated to data centers, but the biological consequences of thermal pollution do warrant concern. You can't just dump hot water anywhere and not expect potential problems.

Re:sooooo ?

[Entropy2016]

Lets get something straight.
An individual can be intelligent and have sincere conerns issues like aquifer sustainability.
Society on the other hand is a selfish greedy bastard the likes of which most people have never bothered to even begin comprehending.

Do you think elected officials who oversee the local water utilities are going to easily raise the price of water when it is detrimental to their reelection campaign?

Raising the cost of water utilities is analogous to raising the cost of gasoline via a tax. We'll never drive efficient cars unless the price of gas goes up into that discomfort-zone (remember $4/gal?). Keeping the cost of gas that high would have done wonders, I mean absolute magic, to whipping America's ass into gear to fight things like urban sprawl, zero investment in public transportation (I live in Texas), and a quick end to SUV's. But when the price of gas went back down, people stopped caring (again).

You can try to raise the price of water. I'd advocate it. But getting elected officials to do that is like asking congress to pass a tax that jacks gasoline back up to $4/gal. It's easy to talk about on an Internet forum, but it's often not so easy in reality.

Re:sooooo ?

[Idaho]

I fail to see why the datacenter is "consuming" water instead of just "using" it. If they develop standards for the cooling system and have the incoming water passively cool internally filtered water, they should be able to pump the hot water out and back into the water system.

The answer is spelled "legionella".

Re:sooooo ?

[pipingguy]

It's trivial, nothing to worry about. Every idiot/convenient fool is now an expert because they can access information on the internet and copypaste. I expect that someone will damn me for saying so and demand 47 government-authorized reports to back me up. If there's one thing the internet has proven is the ability of the uninformed to argue endlessly. Hell, we're already at the state where "uninformed" is being redefined and argued about.

Meanwhile, those of us not arguing as a profession (as opposed to doing it in our spare time) have to get on with the reality of doing the stuff that keeps things working. We're getting pretty annoyed, as that Monty Python sketch was intended as a cautionary tale, not an instructional video.

Re:sooooo ?

[pipingguy]

Vote for engineers as political leaders instead of lawyers.

Re:sooooo ?

[pipingguy]

There are various environmental regulations (depending on region) that dictate what can be done with "gray water". It can be complicated. Often regulations are made with good intents originally, but, following the letter of the law, the regulations actually complicate matters. Which is good, if your income is based on paperwork. And it's easy to subtly draw otherwise productive people into the trap vis over-regulation - we're doing it for the public good, right? And it "creates jobs", right?

Re:sooooo ?

[mlush]

Is there any environmentalist out there who can enlighten me on why the water "consumption" of a data center (or any other major plant) is an issue?

Water shortages are becoming an issue in the US. Water costs money, shortage increases the cost. This is a simple case of planning for the future (and save money in the present).

Becides is there any particular reason that data centers need to use drinking water? There is an environmental cost (chemicals to purify it, energy to pump it etc) to bringing water up to drinking standard. Every gallon of greywater they use is a gallon that does not have to be treated and transported from a distant aquifer/reservoir

Re:sooooo ?

[Anonymous Coward]

How is it hard to raise the price?
In fact just doing that would influence folks not to waste it.

Some users might even anticipate a rise in prices and try to reduce their water usage pre-emptively...

Re:sooooo ?

[marco.antonio.costa]

What are you referring to? Is their use of water or the price fixed?

San Antonio?

[Joffy]

I thought there was a big deal in San Antonio about a water shortage already. Isn't the Edwards aquifer being over taxed?

Re:San Antonio?

[h4rr4r]

The water does not disappear, it runs in cold and comes out warm, is it not just going back into the water treatment system?

Sounds like San Antonio needs to go to a closed loop water system, not data centers.

Re:San Antonio?

[ajlitt]

RTFA. The water loss is because many data centers use evaporative cooling towers.

Re:San Antonio?

[h4rr4r]

I guess that works in the south, here you would get frozen water 8 months out of the year.

Re:San Antonio?

[demonbug]

That's the point - the water does get consumed. The simplest (cheapest) way to cool the water after running it through the data center is to use evaporation towers. As the name implies, you lose a substantial portion of the water to evaporation. Evaporation towers are very efficient in terms of power and material costs, but they go through a lot of water. Costs a lot more to construct a closed-loop system - you need some sort of giant radiator to cool the water. Evap tower you just build a hollow box, put some sprayers at the top, a collector at the bottom, and off you go.

Re:San Antonio?

[h4rr4r]

Why cool it again at all?
Just dump it down the drain and let the water treatment folks send it out again.

Evaporative cooling is idiotic. It only works in hot dry places, the kind of places that are short on water.

Re:San Antonio?

[h4rr4r]

How about building data centers were it is not hot as hell? Where I am you can just pump your glycol to the storage tank that is on top of the building and back 8-10 months of the year.

Re:San Antonio?

[Idiomatick]

What goes up....

Re:San Antonio?

[jhw539]

Nope. If you're pushing 15 MW out of a couple towers 24/7 they will not freeze up. You do run the cooling tower fans backwards for a few minutes every once in a while to thaw any ice that forms from splashing on the intake louvers, but the tower itself doesn't freeze up. Last time I put a tower into a 0F design climate, I used a dry sump so if the tower wasn't on the basin was dry.

An annoying fact of physics is that when it gets really cold, evaporative cooling becomes less effective. The air just can't hold much water, and it's the phase change from liquid to vapor that gets rid of your heat. So, it's not freezing that make low temperatures worrisome but actually loss of capacity.

Re:San Antonio?

[SuperQ]

It's not idiotic, it's very efficient, and as stated by TFA, you can use grey water.. stuff that has been cleaned after you shit in it.

Re:San Antonio?

[plover]

TFA is talking about "grey water", not "black water". Grey water is water that has been used for cleaning (showers, laundry, bathing, etc.), but contains limited biological waste. Black water is the water that has the real sewage in it. Grey water typically requires less treatment than black water.

In most cities and homes the two are always routed out a common sewer pipe, which has to be treated as if it were 100% black water. But in homes with limited septic systems, grey water is sometimes routed straight to the drain field whereas black water first passes through a septic tank. Moving to greener solutions, there are also people that are reclaiming grey water for use in toilet tanks, where there isn't a functional need for fresh water.

Re:San Antonio?

[sjames]

For one, the drain is what we call a sewer. They typically can't clean that up again well enough to just pump back in to the water supply.

It's just as well since commercial air conditioners are prime growth environments for toxic molds. That's why in many systems they add fungicides to the water which are quite toxic. With or without, I doubt that anyone should drink it without considerable and expensive treatment.

Re:San Antonio?

[Anonymous Coward]

I assure you, evaporative cooling towers work even here in Alberta, in -40C weather.

Re:San Antonio?

[jbengt]

Why cool it again at all? Just dump it down the drain and let the water treatment folks send it out again.

Cooling through evaporation only requires about 3%-5% of the water flow to be evaporated and replenshied, plus another 3% or so from blowdown to reduce the concentration of dissolved solids that are left over from the evaporation. So your way would use about 10 to 15 times as much water.

Re:San Antonio?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can I get that in fahrenheit?

Re:San Antonio?

[pipingguy]

Please stop annoying the pimple-faced, know-it-all dorks with facts. :)

Re:San Antonio?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you are missing the concept of a cooling system. You are not taking 100% of the water source, flowing it through the heat source and dumping it, that would be very inefficient. There are usually several cooling loops involved. ex. where I work (www.jlab.org) fans force air through the equipment and into the room where it finds it's way back to the suction of the fan, one loop. A chill water loop is used to cool the room air sending the heat to the refrigeration plant. The refrigeration plant uses freon (or a freon substitute) to remove the heat from the chill water and sends this heat to another water loop. This loop pumps the water to a cooling tower where it rains down into a basin. As the water rains down it's surface area is greatly increased and it gives up it's heat to the air in the tower. As the air heats up it rises effectively forming the final loop. If the return water in the catch basin gets too high variable speed fans kick in to enhance the flow of outside air up the tower. As this water rains down some will evaporate (lots?) this evaporation will remove even more heat with the evaporated moisture. That evaporated moisture is what you see in the plume coming out a cooling tower. That evaporated moisture must get replenished and that is where your high makeup rates can come from. There are variants of this system. Our magnets are water cooled with that water being cooled by the water in the cooling towers, thus 2 loops, 3 if you count the atmosphere.

Breathing gray water spray?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Microsoft chose San Antonio for a huge data center so it could use the local utility's recycled water ('gray water') service for the 8 million gallons it will use each month."

I don't know about the rest of you. But *I* certainly don't want to breathe the air near a cooling tower fed with gray water. The risk of Legionella from CLEAN water in a cooling tower's spray that was contaminated by a bit of local dirt is bad enough. Imagine the risk from breathing the dust particles from partially-treated sewage aerosolized to the tune of 180 gallons per minute.

Sounds like another good reason to avoid Microsoft sites. (Bet they're doing this elsewhere, too.)

Re:Breathing gray water spray?

[h4rr4r]

You don't aerosolise water to cool a data center. You run the incoming cold water through a heat exchanger, and blow air across the other side of the heat exchanger.

Re:Breathing gray water spray?

[Chabo]

... What kind of water-cooling system lets the water evaporate into the air?

Re:Breathing gray water spray?

[h4rr4r]

Swamp cooling, in places were it is hot and the humidity is low it works. Which is exactly were you should not be wasting water as most hot dry places have a lack of water.

Re:Breathing gray water spray?

[Qzukk]

What kind of water-cooling system lets the water evaporate into the air?

Your sweat, as an example.

Re:Breathing gray water spray?

[demonbug]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rancho_Seco_Nuclear_Generating_Station.jpg

See those big towers? Those are evaporative cooling towers. Simple, cheap, and highly efficient in terms of energy costs to operate (not so much in terms of water usage).

Ever wonder why power plants that use steam-driven generators (coal, gas, nuclear) tend to be located near large bodies of water? Same issues that high-density data center operators are discovering.

Re:Breathing gray water spray?

[Anonymous Coward]

And then you have heated water that may be too hot to dump back into the system, be it the local wastewater system or a river or whatever. Now, maybe datacenters don't need to reject enough heat for this to be an issue, but it is something that always needs to be considered when designing an open-circuit cooling loop like that.

Re:Breathing gray water spray?

[Chabo]

Allow me to rephrase:
What kind of computer water-cooling system lets the water evaporate into the air?

Re:Breathing gray water spray?

[supernova_hq]

I think you may be confusing grey water with black water...

Re:Breathing gray water spray?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bong_cooler, as an example.

Re:Breathing gray water spray?

[daybot]

I love the solar panels in the foreground of this picture. Talk about greenwashing!

Re:Breathing gray water spray?

[TClevenger]

I love the solar panels in the foreground of this picture. Talk about greenwashing!

Rancho Seco was decommissioned in 1989. Since then, a public park, gas-fired power plant and massive solar installation have been built on the grounds. The towers are now empty.

Re:Breathing gray water spray?

[theycallmeB]

Many industrial grade AC / refrigeration / ice-making systems spray water over the the condenser coils to improve the efficiency of the system as the evaporating water absorbs much more heat than would the air itself. Especially on hot days. Combined with a large blower fan and low ambient air temperatures, this can actually result in a small snow flurry next to the condenser stack (as if Chicago winters were not already bad enough).

Re:Breathing gray water spray?

[jhw539]

I would be no more concerned about grey water than I am about city water used in a tower. The typical infection path for legionella is city water, usually to immune-system-compromised patients in hospitals taking showers. Cooling towers (properly operated) actively treat the water specifically to deal with Legionella.

Re:Breathing gray water spray?

[aaarrrgggh]

It evaporates outside in the cooling tower.

Data CenterCRAC UnitsChillerCooling Towers

It is also used for swamp coolers (direct or indirect) in some climates, but that is a bit of a pain.

Not using water evaporation means that you need about 30% more electricity during the summer. It is more expensive to have two different systems to allow for using water evaporation just for peak shaving electrical demand.

Re:Breathing gray water spray?

[plover]

Many metropolitan cities have energy companies that use evaporative cooling towers to provide chilled water to office towers for air conditioning.

Re:Breathing gray water spray?

[moosesocks]

Gray water is not sewage. It generally comes from dishwater, laundry, and collected rainfall (ie. from rooftops).

You wouldn't want to drink it, but you could almost certainly swim it with no ill health effects. It's no worse than most pond/river waters.

Re:Breathing gray water spray?

[dbIII]

I don't know about the rest of you. But *I* certainly don't want to breathe the air near a cooling tower fed with gray water

That is exactly the situation with large cooling towers now. People wear face masks when they go inside them because the temperature is fairly ideal to incubate a variety of bugs and there can be a large supply of nutrients that go in from normal lake or river water. I had the interior of one described to me as like the hanging gardens of Babylon - great big threads of algae hanging down all over the interior. There was a fair bit of silicon in the water at that place so they had huge numbers of diatoms - some would effectively be living asbestos if you breathed in the droplets since they were a shape and size where they would get stuck in your lungs. As said above - also ideal Legionella breeding ground if there isn't much in the way of chlorides. You don't let people breath this stuff if you value their health. The vapour of course normally goes up to cloud level where it is just a bit too chilly for any of these nasty things to survive.

Re:Breathing gray water spray?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

No you don't.

  - You run the cooling water through a heat exchanger, picking up the heat from the refrigerant.
  - Then you run the warmed cooling water over a series of baffles in front of a fan.
  - The baffles break the water up into small droplets. The fan encourages part of each droplet to evaporate, cooling the rest.
  - Then you collect the droplets and run them past through the heat exchanger again.
  - You also monitor the water level in the droplet collector and add new water to replace what evaporated.

It's like dumping the heat by boiling off water, but at roughly ambient temperature rather than boiling. Much less power needed for the air conditioner heat pumps.

Downside: Some of the droplets are small enough that they evaporate completely - or nearly so - leaving their impurities as a dust particle or a very muddy microdroplet. These are blown out into the surrounding air by the big fans.

You see these devices as boxes on the top or side of large buildings, spewing out clouds of what looks like fog when the air is humid. (You also see them as giant hyperbolic towers near nuclear power plants.)

Legionaire's disease is a pathogen that lives in the soil. It's pretty fragile and not normally an issue. But occasionally, when a little dirt gets into one of these evaporative cooling devices, the water becomes an ideal culture medium. The bugs multiply. Then they're efficiently encapsulated and sprayed out into the surrounding air by the mechanism I described. Walk past a contaminated cooler and you can breathe in enough to get a massive, often fatal, infection going in your lungs. Such coolers are associated with, and generally located near, the air conditioning equipment. If there's an opening (like an access plate that fell off on the air return duct) and a loose or missing air filter, you can fill the building with the aerosolized bugs and kill BUNCHES of people. (That's what happened to the American Legion convention, where the cluster of deaths lead to the identification and naming of the bug. Before that it there had been a lot of scattered cases, often at hospitals where landscaping work had thrown dirt into the air and the air conditioning coolers.)

But now, instead of using tap water to refill these things, Microsoft plans to use partially-treated sewage, which is just FULL of a grand assortment of human pathogens.

Re:Breathing gray water spray?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

I'm not concerned about legionella. I just used that as an example of fatal pathogens that you can occasionally blast people with when using FRESH TAP water to fill these things.

I'm concerned about the vast assortment of human pathogens (and nutrients for their growth) that you'd find in gray water. IMHO that would make these devices orders of magnitude more dangerous.

Re:Breathing gray water spray?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

I'm presuming they're using treated sewage (equivalent to the "recycled water" used for lawn irrigation at some silicon valley sites and including black water before treatment) rather than "proper" gray water (i.e. untreated sewage from bathtubs, sinks, and floor drains, but not toilets.)

See this FAQ for San Jose, CA's similar operation.

And if you think this stuff is safe, ask yourself why they can't use it for drinking. (And think about what it takes to kill Hepatitis virus, just for starters...)

Re:Breathing gray water spray?

[sjames]

The water is cooled by spraying it at the top of a tower (the chiller) and collecting it at the bottom. It cools by evaporation and aerosolization does take place.

Re:Breathing gray water spray?

[jbengt]

The kind that cools the water to within 7F of the Wet Bulb temperature rather than to within 10F of the Dry Bulb temperature.
http://www.baltimoreaircoil.com/english/products/ct/index.html?page=std
Around here in Chicago, that means 85F water for your condensers to reject heat to rather than the much less efficient 105F that your compressors have to overcome.

Re:Breathing gray water spray?

[Anonymous Coward]

Grey water isn't sewage. It does not have shit or piss in it. Its the water used for washing machines, car washes, showers and the sort. Most residential water consumption results in grey water output, unfortunately it gets dumped in with black water so its not seperated out in most areas so its lost as it combines black water (raw sewage) Its processed and made practically drinkable before its used for anything else. You can't drink it cause its been used with all sorts of chemicals that its just better not to ingest directly, and the effort to sanitize and steralize isn't there, it doesn't need to be if you're just going to turn around and use it in another car wash or to water the grass at the local golf course ... or cool a data center.

Most of the time greywater is reprocessed and used for irrigation systems anyway, this would be pretty much the same thing. Its rather common and unless you live in BFE, your city probably already does this.

Now put on your gas mask, bleach everything in your house and continue to be the moron who is so scared about germs that you die from chemical poisoning due to your over use of cleaning chemicals, or your bodies lack of resistance to bacteria due to your constant hiding from the scary germs.

By all means don't get a clue about what you are discussing, after all, its Microsoft it must be evil.

And you should take the morons that modded you informative along with you.

Re:Breathing gray water spray?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

See this post for my reply.

Re:Breathing gray water spray?

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of computer water-cooling system lets the water evaporate into the air?

Large ones. Efficient ones. Cheap ones.

Re:Breathing gray water spray?

[Entropy2016]

Low humidity... swamp?
Where do you find one of those?

Re:Breathing gray water spray?

[pipingguy]

See those big towers? Those are evaporative cooling towers

I think you are mistaken. Those are actually Poison Towers (it says so, right in these official drawings stolen from the plant by one of our freedom-fighting operatives), designed to kill the local population with nucular radiation and make those 3 eyed fish we see on the Simpsons.

The solution to the current "perception problem" is to fire most current journalists and hire engineering students part time.

Re:Breathing gray water spray?

[jhw539]

The water treatment takes care of pathogens - no one that I know of just runs drinking fountains directly into the tower sump (the most common grey water sources I know of are rainwater from a cistern and RO reject water, which is not available for datacenters but a great option for cleanroom fabs). The largest concern I'd have is actually synthetic pharmaceuticals getting dumped down the sink, but that can be a concern with some tap water sources too. As a sidenote, there isn't much done on opinion in this area. You'd be surprised at the research that has gone into this - kill one or two people and suddenly everyone wants you to measure stuff. Sheesh.

Re:Breathing gray water spray?

[Anonymous Coward]

We have small cooling towers where I work, and the water is treated to prevent the exact scenario you described. Not sure what it is exactly, but its some sort of biocide made by Skasol. Haven't died a horrible bleeding-lung death yet!

Re:Breathing gray water spray?

[Anonymous Coward]

... What kind of water-cooling system lets the water evaporate into the air?

An evaporative cooling system, as you must have read about on your way to make this comment. If it's an evaporative cooling system, we may safely assume that water is evaporating, the name has a nice internal logic to it that points us in this direction. Since we know that water is evaporating, we know it must go somewhere. Where else, besides the air, do you propose it would go?

Re:Breathing gray water spray?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

The water treatment takes care of pathogens

I'll be really interested in how they deal with Hepatitis and Prions, which are extremely hardy. (Ordinary autoclaving won't touch either of 'em, and I somehow doubt all that water is pressure-cooked. Fortunately they don't reproduce outside bodies without major support.) Also in how often they have breakdowns that cause the release of live pathogens of more mundane types.

Meanwhile there are plenty of nutrients in the effluent even when "tertiary treated" - turning the evaporative coolers' contents into a dandy culture medium for many sorts of pathogens that might, even once, escape treatment, or which are picked up from the incoming air, sucked-in insects, bird and rodent droppings, dust, ... A cooler is often the only handy source of water for animals and thus may be quite a popular destination for them despite the noise level.

Re:Breathing gray water spray?

[badkarmadayaccount]

Can't you throw in a basic ozonator and get it over with?

Hot water

[Anonymous Coward]

Makes you wonder if it would be worth it to reuse the hot wastewater in some kind of turbine for power generation. How much energy would you have by feeding already heated water into a turbine? It seems a waste to not use the hot water in some manner or another.

Re:Hot water

[h4rr4r]

How is hot water going to do anything to a turbine?
This water is not boiling.

Re:hot water

[slashtivus]

Yes, I was not very clear, I meant Solar-Thermal. We are in PNW, but the thermal still works reasonably well. Sorry that I was not clear. He did not like the solar-electric costs.

Otherwise it's very funny to me (from a time-frame sense). I had the exact same discussion about this with the person that I mentioned in solar. The Rural Electrification Act was phased out years ago, and I brought up the fact that conventional electric line to a new private residence is almost impracticable. A nice cabin in the woods is easier to out-fit with solar than trying to run privately funded lines to the same place (you might need a small generator to run the laundry or something big, otherwise it works OK).

That conversation was just 2 days ago :)

Agreed about subsidies. Also, water is subsidized as well.

If they would just

[geekoid]

fill the data centers with mineral oil, their heating problems would be solved~

let me get this straight

[fred fleenblat]

So, theoretically, through the use of evaporative cooling at large data centers, local humidity could rise, and...cloud computing could produce actual clouds?

Re:let me get this straight

[Anonymous Coward]

Your jib, I like the cut of it.

conspiracy

[KingPin27]

It seems interesting to note that Google has some of the larger Data Centers - Wal Mart etc.. Its all a conspiracy to get us to google for water resources and come up with buying bottled water from Wal Mart.

Could they purify sea water?

[BlueMonk]

Wouldn't it be possible to turn these data centers into water purification stations by boiling it and collecting/condensing the steam? They could *add* fresh water to the system instead of using it if they were given sea water (if the conduits could be cleaned of the residue left behind).

Re:Could they purify sea water?

[h4rr4r]

Sure, once you figure out how the servers are going to survive at 100C. Then once you got that solved you can figure out how the techs survive at 100C.

Re:Could they purify sea water?

[saiha]

This is actually a problem that is already starting. Hardware designers are making their systems to survive hotter and hotter temperatures (I think rackable is one). This is great because it requires less energy to cool the systems, however it creates a very poor work environment for the techs who have to keep the systems running.

Re:Could they purify sea water?

[BlueMonk]

I thought the heat could be condensed so that even though the servers didn't run that hot, it could be compressed enough to evaporate water (in which case I suppose you'd need to use air instead of water... maybe transfer the heat from the water to air, then compress the air?) Isn't this the principal on which industrial air conditioners work?

Re:Could they purify sea water?

[supernova_hq]

One problem with your idea (other than the extreme heat issue), is that datacenters usually use purified water. Radiators, heat exchangers and even basic water-cooling pipes are usually not designed to handle impurities in water.

Purifying the water after, or even during the cooling process would end up costing more money in replacement parts that get wrecked from the un-purified water going through them.

Re:Could they purify sea water?

[giorgist]

Cool, and they can use the salt to coat the inside of the pipes for shits and giggles

Re:Could they purify sea water?

[geekoid]

If they can build boxes that can stand 100 degrees F, then they won't need cooling, they will just need fans and a few open windows.

I know the original statement was in C, not F.

Re:Could they purify sea water?

[jhw539]

Actually, yes. You don't have to boil the water to evaporate it. However, most datacenter facilities do not want to be in the desalination business and even with the free heat I don't know if it would be cost competitive with reverse osmosis plants. Note that free low grade heat is not a very rare commodity - most low-water locals can get the same grade of heat with very cheap solar collection.

Re:Could they purify sea water?

[Anonymous Coward]

The compressor in an air conditioner takes a lot of electricity. Evaporating the water is cheaper.

Re:Could they purify sea water?

[SpacePirate20X6]

If they can build boxes that can stand 100 degrees F, then they won't need cooling, they will just need fans and a few open windows.

My desktop reads slashdot at 38 C. I've got far less heat/power than a data center.

38*2+32=108 F.

Re:Could they purify sea water?

[Anonymous Coward]

38 C is 100.4 F, not 108.

Re:Generate more water

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll stop shaking my stick if I can thrust it nice and deep into your ass. We both know you love it.

Why so much water?

[icebike]

Why don't these systems cool and reuse the water like every other air conditioning system in the world?

Why are they still using evap-based system, when that was pretty well disappeared from the building cooling industry 30 years ago?

How many big buildings do you see emitting steam clouds anymore?

Re:Why so much water?

[h4rr4r]

That would cost more. These systems have to deal with way more heat.

Re:Why so much water?

[BlackPignouf]

Well, it's just a compromise between water & electricity costs.

If you let some water evaporate, your cooling towers are more efficient and what's left from cooling water comes back at a lower temperature than in a closed cooling tower, thus allowing your chiller to work with a better coefficient of performance : you need more water but less electricity for a given cooling power.

BTW, steam is invisible ;)

Re:Why so much water?

[jhw539]

I'm guessing you must not be from the US because evaporation based cooling systems are THE standard for state of the art industrial and commercial cooling in the US. If you have over 250 tons of load, you have an open cooling tower - dead standard ASHRAE design. The evaporation of water via a cooling tower is THE way you reject heat. If you want to do it dry (as is common in Europe due to much higher fear of Legionella and local code officials freaking out about it), it is FAR less efficient in almost every case, even in monsoon climates like Banglore a wet cooling tower is more efficient.

Re:Why so much water?

[Wonko the Sane]

evaporative is cheaper

Re:Why so much water?

[daybot]

Energy/fuel market fluctuations and the state of local market pricing are two of the most important factors in HVAC system selection. In my area, electricity is 10x more expensive than natural gas, so nobody uses electric water heaters. In the same area 40 years ago, people installed paraffin heaters because that was cheapest for a while.

I can understand how tapping into (groan) a constant supply of cold mains water could, in some areas, be cheaper than traditional closed-circuit A/C. It does seem terribly wasteful, though, especially in areas prone to drought. I guess I feel more guilty about wasting water than coal/oil/uranium... gives me something to think about!

Re:Why so much water?

[Circlotron]

Why not feed the system with "dirty" water, condense the vapour and put it back into the "clean" water supply? Suitably filtered etc of course. Instead of totally wasting the energy, use it in the same way a desalination plant would. The heat you recoup from condensing the hot vapour also helps with heating the next batch of "dirty" water". Why power stations don't also do this is beyond me.

Re:Why so much water?

[bokske]

BTW, steam is invisible ;)

As invisible as this giant plume coming out of the evaporative towers of the nuclear power plant near Antwerp ? I suppose those are really minute water droplets condensed out of the saturated air (as in clouds), so I guess that technically you're right, but you can imagine what the GP is talking about.

Don't come to Denver

[michaelmalak]

Denver is semi-arid -- the only way grass and trees can grow is through irrigation. Water is also not in abundant supply.

Since 2005, parks in Denver are irrigated with treated sewage. As well, the man-made lakes are filled with the same treated sewage, and there are paddleboats on said lakes. (And as a further water conservation measure, said lakes are now getting swimming-pool vinyl liners.)

If you fear treated sewage, you'd best avoid Denver parks, especially around 10:00pm when the high-powered sprinkler systems start up.

Re:Don't come to Denver

[h4rr4r]

Perhaps a better idea would be to not grow grass and trees in denver?

Maybe people could try living in places that actually have water?

Re:Don't come to Denver

[falconwolf]

Maybe people could try living in places that actually have water?

Thing is is in Colorado people can't even use rain catchment systems and cisterns to hold the water. Colorado is 1 of 8 states that are part of the Colorado River Compact that shares the river's water. Want to talk about growing things that need water, the desert city of Los Vegas which before the economic crisis was booming gets all of it's water from the river.

Falcon

piping water

[falconwolf]

We pipe oil 800 miles across Alaska.

Water is piped or pumped now. The Colorado River used to flow from Colorado to the Sea of Cortes or Gulf of Mexico through the desert. Now it rarely makes it all the way, instead Nevada and Arizona cities built in the desert like Los Vegas and Phoenix pump a lot of the water out. Because of the Colorado River Compact 8 states have claims on more water than the river has. Scientists now say that when the pact was drawn up the river reached a high water level.

Some states are now drawing up plans to pipe water from the Great Lakes region to the Southwest.

Falcon

Re:piping water

[slashtivus]

Those states can draw up all the plans they want. The Great Lakes Basin Compact http://www.glc.org/about/glbc.html/ (recognized by congressional consent) says otherwise.

There is also that small problem about the sovereign nation of Canada owning about half of those lakes. Good Luck with that. (That last bit was sarcasm)

Re:piping water

[wpiman]

Don't you watch Fox News; Canada's military is laughable.

My vision for the future

[noidentity]

I envision a future where instead of our computers being powered by water wheels and turbines, they are powered by electricity. Don't dismiss my idea out of hand! It will take lots of work, but I believe we can harness the power of the electron and eliminate this massive waste of water in the long term.

Yeah, I can see lake Erie from my office.

[falconwolf]

People say water shortage and I just think they are mad.

If water is pumped from the Great Lakes to the Southwest you may not see water much longer.

Falcon

Re:Yeah, I can see lake Erie from my office.

[CastrTroy]

That article is from 2002, and basically states that it ain't gonna happen.

Re:Yeah, I can see lake Erie from my office.

[falconwolf]

That article is from 2002, and basically states that it ain't gonna happen.

There are agreements that would prevent it, however my point wasn't that water from the Great Lakes would be pumped but that people will try to get something they don't have they want from somewhere else.

Falcon

So this datacenter...

[jmccarty]

...is a series of tubes? And those tubes can be filled.

Note to self:

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft chose San Antonio for a huge data center so it could use the local utility's recycled water ('gray water') service for the 8 million gallons it will use each month."

Note to self: In the event that I ever have the opportunity to tour Google or Microsoft, do not use the drinking fountains.

pumping hot water out

[falconwolf]

they should be able to pump the hot water out and back into the water system.

That hot water being introduced into the eco system messes it up.

Just think, you could have an entire city that doesn't need individual hot-water tanks!

Hot water tanks are an inefficient use of energy. They have to keep recycling on and off using a lot of energy. Now if solar water heaters are used they lower the electricity or gas that would otherwise be used. As would instant on water heaters. But heated water that's pumped out of a system can be used. Congeneration systems were used in New York City by Thomas Edison. He used the hot water from cooling his plants to heat building when it was cold. Northern Europe uses cogeneration a lot.

Falcon

it's a commons of sorts.

[Todd Palin]

As long as water costs are subsidized, there will be users that will abuse it. If the data centers had to pay the true cost of their water, including environmental costs, they might find a cheaper way to cool the equipment. As it is, the water is so cheap they can use it for a heat sink and throw it away. If they had to pay the whole cost, other means of dumping heat would look pretty good.

evaporative cooling

[falconwolf]

What goes up....

Probably does not come down where it's needed.

Falcon

black, grey-water

[falconwolf]

you can use grey water.. stuff that has been cleaned after you shit in it.

That's blackwater not greywater. Greywater is the used water from the sink and shower/bathtub.

Falcon

Build underwater

[Anonymous Coward]

The next datacenters should be built underwater for perpetual cooling. It's still cause to worry, though, as apparently in a few generations, the data centers will produce heat to rival the surface of the sun.

Solution

[McBeer]

1) Stick a filter on the end of your data center water line

2) Resell it as bottled water

3) Profit

YES! the water evaporates!

[sjames]

For everyone who doesn't know the water in a commercial air conditioner is evaporated, PLEASE see this.

Those states can draw up all the plans they want

[falconwolf]

The Great Lakes Basin Compact http://www.glc.org/about/glbc.html/ (recognized by congressional consent) says otherwise.

I know. My point was that some people will do whatever they can to get something they don't have, no matter the consequences.

Falcon

Re:Those states can draw up all the plans they wan

[slashtivus]

I was just making a counter point for fellow slashdotters to read. I read your other (later) post with a link back to Canada wanting to fight the water transport(Our posts agreed).

I also read your (much later) post about solar water heating, and funny enough I had a co-worker that had looked into solar-electric and stated it was too expensive even including subsidies. I recommended the solar-water heater as something to look into as it would have a decent payout period.

We aren't disagreeing. Cheers.

hot water

[falconwolf]

funny enough I had a co-worker that had looked into solar-electric and stated it was too expensive even including subsidies.

Solar electric for hot water? Did he look into solar thermal? Of course if he doesn't get much sun it wouldn't work either way.

I recommended the solar-water heater as something to look into as it would have a decent payout period.

Yea, even with subsidies most alternative energy sources aren't good for short term savings. Potential buyers need to be made aware, if they already aren't, that the payback period can be several years or more. It's basically only when building Off the Grid where the payback period is only a few years. It can cost thousands of dollars to string powerlines just a thousand feet. If you're building that far out in a good location a solar electric system can be cheaper.

However even conventional power generators such as coal and gas get subsidies as well.

Falcon

History repeats itself

[Anonymous Coward]

The old mainframe systems in the 70's - 90's would run on closed loop chilled water systems. Load them up with distilled water and they were good to go. Evap towers are just a major waste, especially in regions where water is already a scarce resource. Grey water would be a good choice; but it is still a waste of water. Gray water would be perfect for urinals and toilets, another huge waste of water.

Idea

[moniker127]

Why not just route the output of cooling through a series of tubes, underground? Then we could atleast say the internet is COOLED by a series of tubes.

idiots piss me off

[Anonymous Coward]

did anybody else get the urge to hunt down rich miller and beat him senseless for including the term "cloud computing" in this sentence: "The enormous volume of water required to cool high-density cloud computing server farms is making water management a growing priority for data center operators."

Solution already exists

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't they use the Heller-Forgo cooling system, which does not loose and water or steam at all?

I wonder how the evaporative losses are with this!

[mwilliamson]

http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=28.768261,-96.047201&spn=0.103977,0.172348&t=h&z=13 I noticed this a few weeks ago while flying over the area. Yes, this is nuke site.

Another solution.

[mwilliamson]

http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=27.605462,-97.306359&spn=0.013139,0.021544&t=h&z=16 Suck in ocean water from one area, blow it out in another. This plant sucks water from the Laguna Madre (the body of water between the Texas coast and Padre Island) then spills the water into the Oso Bay, which is in turn connected to the Corpus Christi bay. This plant is a natural-gas fired plant, but evidently had coal in mind with the docks...cooling water and fuel via the same route.

Don't "waste" the heat or the water

[HighOrbit]

Instead of spraying the coolant system with water in an evaporating tower, how about a fully closed system where the coolant fluid exchanges the the "waste heat" into a second system that then has a useful purpose like powering some small portion of the building's electricity? The energy from the heat would be transduced and the now cooled coolant flows back.

Re:Don't "waste" the heat or the water

[mwilliamson]

Open systems are used because evaporation carries away far more heat than a closed-loop system. To illustrate, the 6-cycle engine (standard 4-stroke + steam stroke) needs no cooling system whatsoever, and only carries about as much water as fuel.

Increase in rain from datacenters?

[kabocox]

Does any one know if their are slight increases in rain fall around data centers?

This would be a valid question if they are spending a lot water in evaporation. They should know the exact amount that they lost. It's got to come down as rain somewhere. Is it possible to map it/predict it?

How does this waste water vapor effect the climate? Oh no, the world is doomed not because of carbon emissions, but because of water vapor exhaust from data centers!

Use Dune Technology...

[motherpusbucket]

Just have the IT staff wear stillsuits. BTW, how do those connect for bodily waste recycling? Seems like it could be a painful endeavor with lots of inserting.

Water Issues

[Dripdry]

I'm surprised that water issues and technology don't get more attention on slashdot. It really seems to be the next oil. We're backing ourselves into a corner by using far more water than we should. I live right next to the largest source of fresh water in the world and even we are talking about shortages. What it must be like in other parts of the world(like the recent water shortage in Mexico) scares me.

gar

[Anonymous Coward]

I think there is a solution...

in every home is available a cold water and a source of hot water

maybe to link channels of hot water from datacentres to the infrastructure of hot water in the city -

takes cold and gives warmer - it has advantages in energy saving

anybody argues?

Re:Those states can draw up all the plans they wan

[afidel]

If you're close enough to the Great Lakes to know about the compact then I think you will find solar hot water doesn't work. You either need a double transfer glycol system (to avoid possible contamination of drinking water with glycol) or a drain back system with pump. Both have ROI greater than mean expected lifetime so unless you are going it to be off grid or for altruistic environmental benefits then I think you will be disappointed.

Not gonna happen

[default luser]

I'll give you two good reasons we're not ever going to see this.

1. Los Angeles has already tackled the concept of pumping-in water, but they have the advantage of only having to go 400 miles through uninhabited terrain, and downhill the whole way. If they ever use-up all the water in the Sierra Nevadas, the next step will be to build desalinization plants, which will be cheaper (and less legally-challenging) than piping water thousands of miles.

2. Aside from Los Angeles, NOTHING in the southwest is an important center for commerce. Los Angeles is a major port city, a major tourism destination, and a home for many large businesses. Phoenix? Can dry-up and wither in the desert heat, for all the world cares.

Right now, people flock to Arizona because it's cheap and warm. But if the price of water skyrockets, it will simply be warm, and people will find other places to go. When things get so bad that it's economical to pump water from the lakes into the Arizona area, people will simply move back to where the water is.

Re:Those states can draw up all the plans they wan

[slashtivus]

I'm originally from the Midwest and still keep up with the news there. I now live in the Pacific Northwest.

Pumping Lake Erie water to the Southwest

[falconwolf]

I'll give you two good reasons we're not ever going to see this.

There's a bigger reason Lake Erie water won't be pumped to the Southwest, there's a compact or agreement between the US and Canada.

NOTHING in the southwest is an important center for commerce. Los Angeles is a major port city, a major tourism destination, and a home for many large businesses. Phoenix?

Intel is in Phoenix, including fabs. From 2005, "Intel To Build New 300 mm Wafer Factory In Arizona".

Can dry-up and wither in the desert heat, for all the world cares.

Yea, for all I care. I oppose any more building and growth there. That applies to LA and Imperial Valley too though. If not for the water pumped from the Colorado River the farms in Imperial Valley would not even exist.

Falcon