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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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]

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 ?

[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 ?

[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 ?

[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 ?

[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 ?

[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 ?

[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]

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 ?

[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.

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?

[ajlitt]

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

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?

[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.

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]

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?

[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?

[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.

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?

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?

[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.

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.