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Using the Sea To Cool Your Data Center
1sockchuck writes "We haven't yet seen signs of the Google Navy of seagoing data centers that use the ocean for power and cooling. But data center developers are planning to use sea water air conditioning in a new project on the island nation of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. Cold water from deep-sea currents would be piped ashore to be used in a heat exchanger for the data center facility. A similar system has been used to replace the chillers at Cornell University, which draws cold water from Lake Cayuga. The Cornell system cost $50 million, but has slashed cooling-related energy usage by 86 percent."
But what are maintenance costs and lifespan of such a piece of equipment,
I can't image Saltwater not eating the hell out of all the piping.
All the talk about using the ocean makes one wonder if Google or another company could build a data center that was self-sufficient in the middle of the ocean, would it be under any jurisdiction when it came to copyright?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Although this solution is certainly "low power" by no means should it be considered to be entirely green. I work as an engineer on many projects that involve sea water, and when you're using it for a cooling source you typically need to inject some sort of chemical to sterilize the water to keep growths off your heat exchangers (barnacles are sort of a pain in the ass in your exchangers). As a result, using sea water for large scale cooling operations is prohibited in large regions of the United States (specifically the gulf coast) mostly over concerns that the large amounts of warm bleached water will damage the ecosystem. Although, that issue aside, using the ocean as a cooling medium is a great idea, and has been used reliably by power plants for many years.
This would be a good idea for the Great lakes, where the water stays very cold all year 'round.
It could be a good way to attract business to the Midwest.
Toronto already uses cold water cooling for air-conditioning many of its office towers in the downtown core and has for many years. (see: http://www.enwave.com/dlwc.php). Unless winter never visits Canada again, this is cold body is self-replenishing.
If you could set up an OTEC system as well you could also power the data center as well as cool it.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
So Cornell transfers heat from its datacenters into Lake Cayuga. This is understandably good for the datacenters, but what's the impact on Lake Cayuga?
The Mauritius system sounds interesting, though, because the heat gain in the water seems less likely to have an impact on ocean temperatures, even on a very localized scale. For minimal environmental impact, use large, deep bodies of water with good currents. Take note, Cornell!
Powerplants use this frequently, it's a great idea until the amount of warm water discharged begins affecting the discharge site. I can't imagine a data center requiring the amount of cooling that a powerplant would need.
The EPA required some modifications to a similar system for a powerplant in PR a few weeks ago.
http://www.waterworld.com/index/display/article-display/1830526029/s-articles/s-waterworld/s-industrial-water/s-wastewater/s-2009/s-08/s-epa-requires_new_pipe.html
With a bit of luck, slashdotting them could get Global Warming as side effect. Looks like a good terrorist/supervillain/evil scientist plot.
Think they are already doing the sea water cooling thing at the old sawmill in Hamina that Google bought.
http://www.google.com/intl/en/datacenter/hamina/index.html
seriously this is pretty direct
I'm not too sure about the anthropogenic global warming, but I'm starting to come around to it. Earlier my contention was that global warming scientists are causing global warming, but I'm beginning to think that maybe -- just maybe -- computers in general might be the cause. I mean, if computers are having to pump cold water from the ocean depths to cool computers, that's gotta be dumping a lot of heat back into the ocean, right? Right...?
Most of downtown Toronto is cooled by lakewater - enwave energy provides district cooling for most of the major buildings in the downtown core. This includes 151 Front St., one of the major datacentres in the area. See here
I might just be a bit far out with this (non sea water) solution, but why don't they just install a heat exchanger to generate their own electricity? It generates electricity whilst not costing the earth in installation / cooling costs.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Didn't they try this in New Orleans a couple of years back?
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
Am I the only one that reads things like this as:
"Check out this great new way to heat our oceans using our datacenters!".
You guys realize that the energy doesn't just disappear, right?
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
"Welcome, humans! I am ready for you! Fish, plankton, sea greens and cooling from the sea. Fresh as harvest day. Overwhelming, am I not? Are you, too, startled? Am I too removed from your kin?"
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Raising the temperature of a body of water by even a few degrees can have disastrous consequences; from outright killing species, to producing algal blooms that deplete oxygen levels (and then kill species). I mean, think about it. Water resists temperature change much more than air, so a sudden increase is bad news to creatures that just aren't made to deal with it. Also, a recent study has found that increased carbon dioxide levels are making marine life more susceptible to fluctuating temperature and oxygen levels.
But, of course, just one place in the ocean using this method isn't going to have that much effect. It's if and when this cooling strategy starts to catch on that we have to worry about affecting our environment, and weigh the consequences of air conditioning (fossil fuel emissions) versus heat pollution.
There was a story of a LNG (Liquid Natural Gas)facility that lost approval for using this method to do cooling for a facility (or something in the LNG process) with Gulf coast seawater. The problem is that all the baby fish and other sea life die in the system. They were worried about the local shrimp and fishing industry getting wiped out. They made them use a closed loop system to solve this problem.
They should be more involved in getting optical computing on the table. That more than any other tech will have a profound effect on energy requirements. And given some of the latest R&D, the tech is getting very close to reality.
:T:R:A:N:S:
I thought the greeniacs were all up ons about nuclear plants using seawater for cooling because the heated exhaust invariably caused altered conditions at the point of discharge. And far be it from us horrible ebil humans to actually change the environment. That's just wrong.
So what makes this different?
Using Your Data Center to Warm the Sea?
Can't you just heat it up to sterilize it?
During the winter, does the Arctic Regional Supercomputing Center spend money (energy) heating their offices while cooling off their computers at the same time?
hurray! bringing the warmth to the poles with even less inbetween steps! this efficiently gives us more melting water, which in turn can cool our datacenters even more. So at one point in the future you're google query is being cooled by water which once was ancient glacier ice. (that's alot of 'c-'s , which are those things which we were using in the first place to cool everything)
Other than a set up for your gag, I don't see why you call paint a thermal insulator. It does not have to be so. many kinds of coating promote thermal coupling.
One thing that does bother me is dumping waste heat in someone elses backyard for free promotes the inefficient use of energy. that is, I can decrease my cooling costs by using more efficient but more expensive computers which incidentally produce less waste heat, or I could use less expensive inefficient computers and take advantage of public domain cooling, like cayuga lake.
Is Cornell paying a tax to use Cayuga lake as a heat dump? that would help internalize the economic externalities that drive them to consume more electricity because the cooling is free.
likewise for sea water cooling.
This might seem like worry much about a small thing: isn't the cooling resevoir comparatively infinite? the answer is surprising no, not only is it not infinite, it's never going to grow, and we have already saturated it in much or the US and Europe. For example the big limit on Nuclear power plant growth is now availability of cooling. SOme rivers in Tenesee are known to heat up to 80 degrees when the power plants operate a full power in summer.
thus this needs to be publicly regulated now.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
For decades we've recognized this exact same kind of exploitation of coastal waters as pollution. Why would this suddenly be acceptable for a data-center, and how will they avoid the associate ecological devastation?
I read the script, and I think it would help my character's motivation if he was on fire. -Bender
Instead of figuring out better ways to cool hot datacenters, I think a better investment would be to figure out how to make the data centers run cooler in the first place.
Each new generation of semiconductor technology typically allows 2 ways to improve: faster computing for same power, or less power for same computing.
You'd think that at some point, the second choice makes more sense than the first.
Of course, there is the problem of who can make these improvements. This is limited to the chip companies, whereas just about anyone who knows how to use a screwdriver can work on the cooling problem.
I solved my own version of the problem by switching to notebook computers instead of desktops. I get disgusted every time I look at the power requirements of modern desktops: they burn over 100 watts when sitting idle. That's just stupid. Most notebooks don't use that much even running flat-out.
I wonder how many data center boxes are burning 100 watts just sitting idle?
Host Chopper has been using sea water to cool their data centers for at least a month now. Get with the times, Google..
What when the cold currents run out of cold water due to overharvesting of the cold water from the cold currents? What will happen to ocean-life that depends on this cold water?
I am amazed that for all the large number of reservoirs that western USA has, we never put heating/cooling coils in the bottom of these. Almost all from Colorado north contain snow melt and the bottom of these are around 40F (4C). It seems like many of these would be good places to run large pipes and simply use these for cooling AND heating. For example, Horsetooth reservoir of Ft. Collins could easily heat/cool a number of facilities and even a data center. Cherry creek, Chatfield, etc would also be capable of doing the same. Many of these are 100-200 f/40-70m deep. Nuts, taking it a step further, I am surprised that some of these nuke plants do not use this as a means of energy storage (2 side hydro plant) combined with the ability to dump heat on the hotter days.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Hogtown (Toronto, Canada) has done this for about 10 years. Not just datacenters, but downtown office buildings and hi-rises. A giant pipe (about 1 meter in diamenter) sucks water about 30 km/h in, and runs it through the buildings, keeping them cool in the summer. The reduction in cooling costs is about as others have described. There was a significant amount of research done do determine environmental and ecological impact prior to doing this. In the end, they noted the temperature of the water overall goes up about 1-2 degrees, but the mean water temperature does not increase year-on-year.
Cooling data centers accounts for almost 50% of the power consumption. This is a massive amount of energy used for cooling.
But sea water has several disadvantages mostly keeping the system clean, barnacles, muscles and other small plants and animals will get sucked in to the system, and eventually clog up everything. It's also very corrosive. In addition hot water discharged from the system will hurt local ecosystems in both salt and freshwater systems.
Using the Hull of a ship would solve the clogging problems, where there is a large mass of metal in which to dissipate heat without having to pump seawater. Even with paint, there is a massive amount of surface area on a ships hull.
Still using seawater is still not a very good solution. Even is it's cost effective in reducing energy consumption.
When I had my start-up Nisvara Inc.(2002 to 2006 RIP) we worked out that we could accomplish the same using nothing but chiller towers that just used evaporative cooling. In cooler climates like where we were based at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View Ca, we worked out that we could cool the largest computer cluster what would have been built at that time using nothing just large truck style radiators and fans. No compressors or any active cooling just circulating water or cooling fluid.
A lot of data centers objected to the use of water because it would damage equipment. The Nisvara solution kept water in continuous copper tubes without any joints or seals. Still that wasn't enough to belay their fears of water contacting electricity, so we also found other suitable coolants such as using 3M Novec 1230 Fire Protection Fluid. It's amazing stuff. Totally green and safe also known as "Dry Water" and "Waterless Water", will not harm equipment and just happened that it could be used as a coolant too.
It may even be useful as a refrigerant because it can phase change at a lower temperature then water, but this would have required more research.
I write about this at my blog http://thegreentank.blogspot.com/2009/09/slashdot-using-sea-to-cool-your-data.html inspired by this slashdot post.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
yeah and that won't cause global warming. Well, at least it DIRECTLY heats the ocean so no lost words there...
I remember reading somewhere about a guy who pretty much took all the computer parts out of the case and stuck them in a plastic box and filled it with vegetable oil. Apparently the hard drive won't leak. And the device cooled by dissipating the heat into the oil. He then sealed the top and had only a few wires coming out. I wonder how that worked for him. I figure bigger computers would need more cooling so maybe you could stick the parts in oil in a glass aquarium, seal it up, and stick the aquarium in a lake or ocean to help cool the oil. Anyone heard anything like that?
Another useful idiom that we'll have to put away because we made it happen.
I can't understand why they want to go through the trouble of pumping very corrosive seawater (with the occasional squid or barnacle in it) instead of just hanging a radiator in the sea and pump their own coolant through it.
Did I miss something?
Insert
They forgot the "nevermindweboilthefish" tag... fixed that for ya.. although this is probably a CO2 friendly way of global warming ...
Why do the pipes have to be metal...
In the 1980s, my university had a Cray computer and a swimming pool. Some engineering students did the math: it was possible to bring the swimming pool to temperature using the cooling of the Cray. The only reason this did not happen was the two and a half kilometers between the pool and the calculation centre.
You can keep pool water sterile/inhospitable with other methods
o3 as used in pools should be ideal here- it disappears from the system very quickly.
chlorine (bleach) does tend to sit around in the water and react longer, o3 is very toxic to life, but tends to obliviate itself
a giant corona discharge wire on the inlet-- no?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I've often thought that a good place for a data center would be adjacent to a hydro-electric plant. Hydro has it's disadvantages as an electrical generation source, but that ship has sailed so to speak (fish ladders, upstream and downstream shore effects). Given that we have them, we could use data centers to mitigate one of the existing environmental problems of hydro dams, namely cold water pollution.
One of the effects of a hydro dam is that it releases very cold water downstream, much colder than the water would be if the dam were not there. Case in point is a trip I took with Scouts a few years ago. After portaging our canoes, we require everyone to wash with a grease cutting soap to mitigate the effects of any poison ivy we may have tromped through. Not a problem, as it is generally fun to jump into the fast moving water that is released at the base of a dam. The only problem is that the water is COLD. It comes from the bottom of the reservoir, so it is naturally colder than the water flowing normally. As an aside, we had some scouts from Bermuda with us, and when the first one jumped in, he came up barely able to breath because the water was so cold. I don't think he'd ever felt water that cold!
Anyway, it seems to me that the water being released could be warmed before being discharged if there was a data center that could "harness the coldness" of that water. Seems to me, it would be a win, win - the data center would get free cooling for their servers, while at the same time it would be able to mitigate the coldness of that water. And the bonus is that co-located with a hydro dam, there is little chance that you'd lose power to the data center - utilities are good at making sure all their plants have good links to the grid... so you've killed something like 3 or 4 birds with one stone.
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
I interviewed folks that built the UNIVAC in Philadelphia in the 1950's. One installation was placed near a lake and water was piped in. After a while small fish got sucked in so they added a filter with a hand turned corkscrew to grind up the fish - it was cooled by fish bouillabaisse - true story - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXEVstPEZLs
There's no problem with painting the pipes coming in and out of the ocean - that would help, actually, as you want to maintain the cold temperature until the sea water reaches the heat exchanger on land. There you can use more expensive, non-rusting materials like stainless steel, aluminum (well it oxidizes but I don't know how much of a problem that is), or whatever in the heat exchanger. I think the real problem would be filtering out the other crap the intake pipe is likely to pick up that could damage whatever pump they're using and clog the heat exchanger. If the pipes are painted, paint chips could be another problem...I wonder if they could use PVC pipes?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
With setups like this, why not run the resulting warm/hot water through a Stirling engine to generate some electricity? It cools the water down to lessen any potential environmental impact and should produce some meaningful amount of power. Seems like a win/win. Maybe if the water falls from the data center they can run it through a turbine or water wheel too...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel