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

[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

[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

[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

[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)

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 ?

[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 ?

[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 ?

[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: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.

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: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.