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The Fjord-Cooled Data Center
1sockchuck writes "A new data center project in Norway plans to use a fjord-powered cooling system, drawing cold water from an adjacent fjord to cool data halls. The fjord provides a ready supply of water at 8 degrees C (46 degrees F), eliminating the need for an energy-hungry chiller. The Green Mountain Data Center joins a small but growing number of data centers are slashing their cooling costs by using the environment as their chiller, tapping nearby lakes, wells and even the Baltic Sea."
from environmentalists over warming the fjord water in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
Hydrothermal datacenter vent creatures...
Building things in a cold climate keeps them cold.. . Film at 11
. .
As long as they do not destroy Slartibartfast's fjords then I am "cool" with it.
GO BLUE!
We're always looking for more afjordable options for data cooling. As long as they avoid the local pines in their construction. No one wants to be pining for the fjords....
Here's to losing my Karma Bonus again....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankine_cycle
The industrial revolution was growing on chill-water supplied by nature long before the triode, never mind the transistor, had been invented. And all the environmental issues came up long before Al Gore was born.
We have Slartibartfast to thank for this.
I write professional videogame reviews! http://www.digitallydownloaded.net/
I have been pining for this
I wonder why it is that the thought of running a light-water nuclear fission power plant with only the atmosphere for cooling doesn't bother me, but the thought of using a fjord to cool a data-center does.
It's an unsettling feeling...there must be a reason, I just can't think of it right now.
I am John Hurt.
Oh, every week there's a canal.
Or an inlet.
Or a fjord.
50C is my bet.
So what will happen to the fjord bios when they start filtering that hellsh torrent from the Datacenter?
Dead fish for eveybody.
Alaska comes quickly to mind.
But even better would be the ski resorts. Plenty of bandwidth close to these, esp in Colorado. Likewise, plenty of cold and energy.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I came here looking for a chjevy-powered cooling system.
John
They don't make Fjords and Czevies the way they used to.
From the news:
Casey Wong: On the international scene, the Amazon nuclear facility has blown its stack, irradiating the world's largest rain forest. Environmentalists are calling it a disaster.
Jess Perkins: But don't they always.
(Wondering if you'll understand the joke here...)
You have to figuring in more than just cooling:
1. How much does power cost in the location
2. How much power is available. Data centers suck huge amounts no matter how efficient.
3. Do people want that heat island near them.
4. Is the data center near the consumer of its resources? Latency still matters to me.
Or somewhere similar in space.
For a minute there I thought they were trying to get Bjork to cool it.
This isn't new. Control Data, when they were next to Seymour Cray's farm in Minnesota, was dumping hot water into a well, while pumping cold water up from another nearby well. Once you drill down 15m or so, ground water temperature doesn't change much year round, and in Minnesota, it's around 46-52F.
A while back a business here wanted to use Pacific water to cool its equipment. They got turned down because discharging Pacific water back into the Pacific was deemed "contaminating" it because of the contaminants already present in the water that was going to be drawn from the ocean. I think they ended up going to a saner state.
Norwegian Deep Blues.
Changes that render the environment unfit for human survival will force us to develop such technologies as practical biodomes, multi-level indoor farms that can produce plenty of food, cost-effective vat-grown meat, power sources that can run all of this gadgetry, and so on.
We need all of that in order to colonize other planets, since the majority of them have environments that are a lot more toxic to us than ours will ever be.
And, obviously, we need to colonize other planets in order to ensure the long-term survival of our species.
So, I say, pollute for the greater good!
I forgot how many times did i utter the same sentence this month. and yet another. scandinavia again.
see the evils of socialist (social democrat in world political jargon) education and continued governance. (for the majority of last 80 years at least).
more innovation per resource and population than the totally 'innovative' capitalist u.s. where is the wealth the 1% hoarding ? apparently not into innovation. for, if it did, we would be colonizing mars by now with the resources and population america has. but instead, there are homeless in the streets and police beating down students.
Read radical news here
1+2/ Huge steep hills plus glacial lakes means cheap hydro power in Norway.
3/ Do you really think this is going to pump out much heat in comparison with realitively trivial heat sources like factories for making potato chips? Also since most of that heat is supposed to be going into the massive heatsink of a deep Fjord connected to a cold ocean it's not going to matter beyond a few metres from an outlet anyway.
4/ For most purposes within the same hemisphere is plenty.
Seawater cooling is an expensive pain in many ways but there's well over a century of experience with it. The data centre itself will probably have a freshwater loop and then a heat exchanger keeping that corrosive seawater out of the place.
Doesn't that warm the fjords?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
As soon as I saw the word "fjord" in the title, I stopped thinking about the topic and started planning a Monty Python tie-in post.
#DeleteChrome
There are a number of similar projects around the country:
Lefdal Mine: http://www.lefdalmine.com/index.php
Fjord-IT: http://www.fjordit.com/ (these guys have a VERY cool concept - keep an eye out)
Rjukan Mountain Hall
And there's Thor Datacenter in Iceland: http://www.thordc.com/
Intriguing..... intriguing.....
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
I was applying for a job as a system administrator in the northern parts of Norway.
They had simply drilled their datacenter into the mountain. They had a steady supply of 8 degree Celsius air from the surrounding cool mountain.
It might not scale as well as cooling with water, but there is lot of rock in Norway...
How do they afforjd this?
Cod be praised!
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
But in the end we couldn't affjord it.
Granted, Norwegian summers hardly last all year, but sea temperatures are not a steady 8 degrees throughout the year as the article seems to imply. People can and do bathe in the ocean in southern Norway during the summer and temperatures can reach 18+ degrees in the water. 8 degrees is probably the average, but a "steady supply of water at 8 degrees C" seems somewhat misleading.
Am I missing something here or is this simply normal overselling?
Horse crap. Toronto starting building a system like this in 2001. A large portion of the downtown including almost the entire financial district has been using this technique since 2004. It's called Deep Water Lake Cooling and takes 4 degree Celsius water from a point 5 km offshore and 83 metres deep in Lake Ontario. The water is treated first and much of it goes to the municipal water system directly, but some is diverted to the closed loop heat exchangers used in the cooling system and then on to the municipal water supply so that there is no waste heat transmitted back to the lake. All the buildings connect to this heat exchanger. Toronto has 2.5 million people and the financial district is around 20 square blocks. There are at least 140 buildings on the system now, including most if not all of the up to 80 story sky scrapers that occupy the core of the area. It is the largest system of its kind in the world. It has a capacity (PDF File) to cool 29,000,000 square feet (about 2.7 million sq metres) of office space. And if that doesn't beat all, it was mentioned on Slashdot in 2004.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
... I was just pining for one of those.
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. -HLM
I work in the power industry and can say that seawater cooling isn't really a problem at all. The main expense is on the maintenance of the heat exchangers. But seeming that you already have a crew in place doing maintenance on the entire plant, the only cost in reality is the replacement parts and chemicals required to prevent growths in your system. Most modern heat exchangers are designed so that the fins can be individually removed and serviced while the system is in service. (we design offshore substations that are seawater cooled).
Yes, of course. But the alternative would be to run a water cooled electrical power-plant that uses the water on the cool end of their heat engine and pumps more heat into the water and then run an AC that pumps the heat from the data center into the atmosphere. So this ends up putting less heat into the environment overall. There can be arguments for why not to put this type of data center in some sensitive environment, say spawning grounds, but those same arguments would be made about the power plant and there is no reason to think Norway doesn't do the type of environmental assessments that would prevent you from dumping heat into a sensitive area. Using a body of water for cooling isn't a new idea, it's used for air-conditioning skyscrapers all over the world. Data centers have been built up very quickly in the couple decades and are just now starting to be made more efficient. As far as I know all the issues have solutions. The water intakes are designed not to suck in too much fauna and the exhaust is mixed with cold water and/or located where it will have minimal impact (there are of course a lot of grandfathered in power-plants that don't do this, but the solutions exist.)
This is old tech. Marlon Brando famously used sea water to cool his resort hotel in the Pacific. The problem with these systems is life. Organisms find their way into the pipes. Barnacles, oysters, etc love the moving water, and inevitable clog up the intake and outtake plumbing. The maintenance required to clean the plumbing makes these systems impractical.
Transfer the heat to nearby houses. ffs
As someone who lives in Toronto new the sewage treatment plant...
The waste water does go back into the lake. They take some stuff out of it, but that's... uh... the stuff that makes it sewage. Heat sunk into the water by the chillers is allowed to remain.
So we now have a re-use for nuclear power reactor sites.
Instead of warming rivers and lakes to cool power generators we can warm them cooling power users!
Norway is cool enough most of the year for an open air datacenter. Or they could build it underground in the permafrost, it stays near zero all year, but building underground can be expensive.
Screw that, I'm driving a Fnord.
headline should read, "The Data-Center Heated Fjord." What could possibly go wrong?
if you're discharging heat in a normally cold country, I can think of better uses than making goldfish happy to live in the fjords.
As someone who lives in Toronto, the water taken for cooling does not go back to the lake, it is goes back into the drinking water supply. Of course after we finish drinking and shitting, it gets treated and goes back to the lack, but not back to deep water which would thermally pollute the deep water layer and cause environmental impact. The water is cold because it cools in the winter and sinks there and is basically insulated by the depth. However if there was no winter it likely would be significantly but naturally warmer than 4 degrees C. So they don't want the water returned. Returning the water to the surface after being used for household water and treated does not heat the lake as the returned water is essentially surface water and is the same temperature as water at the surface.
You misunderstood. It adds expense, hence the words "expensive pain". I haven't been in the power industry since the 1990s but back then I was working on component failure analysis, mostly on the generating side, and mostly with inland power stations which is why there was so much contrast with the seawater cooled power stations. My point is that with clean fresh water cooling is a lot easier.