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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."
Won't someone please think of the norwegian blues?
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
Oblig:
African or European?
But more seriously, that is a problem with environmentalists -- they can't separate the forest from the trees (I'm only being slightly sarcastic here). From what I've been able to tell by talking to these 'greenies', any environmental impact is bad. It's not enough to be carbon neutral, or conserve energy, save the whales, or whatever else is currently in vogue in their movement. It is a political movement that is based on a sliding scale of "purity". I can easily see one of them extolling the virtues of living in a house that has no electricity, is built entirely out of clay, and they don't cook their food (because fire releases carbon). What's worse, they feel guilty about having any modern conveniences, and so they try to buy indulgences like "carbon credits" or "EVA cars" ... which when you look into the total lifecycle of the vehicle and it's total environmental impact, you don't wind up any better off than a conventional car. A lot of environmentalism is just a shell game... it's moving the responsibility around so they can claim they're "carbon neutral" or whatever while someone else (usually the government, or some corporation) are the bad guys.
The bottom line is, the problem with the movement is that they can't see that progress towards environmental goals are only achievable by being economically competitive. I mean, everybody right now is going crazy about living "grid free". But the problem isn't the grid. The 'grid' is just a collection of wires and transformers. It's the management and production of that resource that is the problem; If the environmentalists wanted to "save the planet", they'd come up with a way to transport electricity over very long distances with minimal losses. That, right there, is the kind of tech we need to reduce our dependence on coal, oil, etc. Until we can cheaply move energy to where it's needed on demand, we're stuck with dino fuel because it's the only thing with a high energy density that can be built right now -- you can't build a nuclear power plant anywhere in this country right now even if you wanted to... and even if you could, nobody wants it near a city, which is where it needs to be to be useful.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Who are these environmentalists you know who hold these positions? Someone serious or some stupid cunt you went to school with?
XML causes global warming.
I came here looking for a chjevy-powered cooling system.
John
They don't make Fjords and Czevies the way they used to.
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.
Ever heard the expression "drop in the ocean"?
This time it is to be taken literally too. Warm water of a data center won't change the temperature of the ocean at all.
But any way, what is the other option? The heat has to go somewhere. Warming the air (that will then warm the ocean)?
As long as you go deep enough and that the water is circulating in that fjord, there is no negative environmental impact.
It IS something to take into consideration. And it doesn't even have to be some enviro-nut who is tying himself to trees to save the endangered fern.
Here's how it works in reality: many fjords are home to commercial fishing and aquaculture. All those species are adapted to cold water and don't do well in warm water. What happens if a data center warms the water around the effluent by a couple of degrees? Cold-water fish, shrimp, clams move away and the people who depend on them have to move with them. It's probably fine if there's just one data center in the Fjord, and the warming is highly localized. maybe a few hundred square meter of surface area. But what if there's more? What if there are ten data centers in the Fjord? Or other industries in need of cooling? Suddenly the entire fjord warms, and it's not only the fish, shrimp and clams that are gone, but the livelihood of the people in the area.
Environmentalism isn't about building absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone. It's making sure that what you build allows others to still live in the area in the foreseeable future and without having to dramatically adapt their lifestyle. Sometimes, it means that a data center using fjord water is ok. Sometimes it means that a data center using fjord water is not ok.
Yeah, life is full of grey and subtilities and hard decisions that aren't black and white. Sorry to disappoint you.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
You're grouping environmentalists all in to one bucket. It doesn't work that way.
I am an avid environmentalist. According to you, I don't support Nuclear power in my backyard. Yet, I actually support it. Newer technologies mitigate a lot of the safety concerns and we can figure out better ways to store waste and even better technologies that yield less waste.
As for the transport of electricity I think there already is an excellent method. Aluminum Gallium power sources produce hydrogen from water and all you would need to do is ship them back to a Nuclear power plant where it would be vastly more efficient to remove the Oxygen to recondition the power source.
That's a pretty progressive idea.
I am not against the whole cooling from the fjord idea, but you would have to be a complete idiot not to realize that an environmental impact study would need to be conducted if the hot water was being put right back in the fjord. Of course they don't have to do that at all. They can just use passive heat exchangers with the surrounding air instead. Better yet, use the heat for surrounding buildings, offices, etc. or even convert it back into energy. So many more options than just dumping it back in the fjord.
There is a difference between "screaming hysteria" and "gee what happens when we raise the water temperatures around the datacenter a couple degrees?".
Economically competitive is just a cop out. What it really means, is that you have a limited commitment towards change. In my personal view, which has had heated debates, we are fucked already. Leave economics out of it and make the hard decisions now. That does mean start building as many nuclear reactors as possible right now because they are the most immediate solution to massive amounts of power generation that can be used immediately for heating, cooling, industry, etc.
Short term pain == Long term gain. Problem is nobody wants to sacrifice and any environmentalist that proposes serious sacrifice is labeled a hypocrite (appropriate in some situations) or just plain crazy.
As for off the grid people, all you can really do in the end is control your own actions and voice your opinions and ideas cogently and passionately and hope it helps. Those people you are denigrating are doing the sacrificing because it is what they can do. I sacrifice as much as possible, and writing on a laptop does not make me a hypocrite.
P.S - It's not so black and white when you label people. I propose extreme austerity measures but also very aggressive and progressive changes.
Oh, it's your standard straw man extreme environmentalist. It's pretty popular to refer to them these days, but it's extraordinarily rare to observe them in the wild. I'm sure they do exist somewhere, but I've never met one personally.
They remind me of white crows -- rare and not typical of the species.
The environmentalists invented by Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh.
Exactly. A nuclear power plant can mess up local environmental temperatures. Not a data center putting out a few hundred thousand BTU.
*screams of hysteria*
But more seriously, that is a problem with environmentalists -- they can't separate the forest from the trees.
Hey smartypants, anyone can?
Polititians, religious leaders, billionairs - the military perhaps?
A European Court judment determined that airlines need to buy carbon credits for 15 % of their carbon (CO2?) emissions.
Prudent step? Maybe, just watch what will happen.
But more seriously,
No you are not serious because you don't know what you are talking about. Your comment reads like a rambling complaint of some person you met who claimed to be an environmentalist. You conflate environmentalism with renewable energy and neglect to realize that most of the major positive environmental progress in the last 30 years has not been due to economic competitiveness, but rather due to the scientific realization that human activity has adverse effects on the environment and human health. GET IT? Most environmentalists I know are scientists who work unglamorously behind the scenes to identify and characterize threats that certain human activities pose to the environment and human health. And, unfortunately, many are simply unwilling to strongly advocate for their issues because the pressure they face by a bunch of wildly ignorant citizens with wildly misinformed views on science and environmentalism. Now, carry on with your ill informed diatribe on electricity infrastructure and everybody's obsession with off-grid living.
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.
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.
The results of the research, performed by the government agency for fisheries (not the nuclear industry) actually indicates that, on balance, fish growth is actually promoted, as are many other species of birds etc.
Opportunistic species appeared in very high abundances while species with more
narrow tolerances decreased or disappeared. The total production of macrofauna increased.
Total benthic biomass stayed at a high level in the Biotest basin up to 1989,
but during the later years there has been a general decrease in both
biomass and abundance of most common species and the risk that fish food
production is becoming critically low is evident. The scenario â" increasing
fish biomass â" heavy grazing â" benthic fauna collapse â" starving fish â" was
discussed already when the studies started in the Biotest basin. Today, ten
years later, we can see the first signs that these misgivings turn out to be justified.
Yeah, not quite exactly as you portrayed it. Plenty of other stuff in that report that is far, far more ambiguous than you made it out to be, like growth retardation and increased mortality rates for perch. There may be more perch but they are of suckier quality.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Up to that point I suspected you knew what you were writing about, but this is where you've dropped out of your depth. Avoiding the problem of hot water in the Fjord can be done even with GW heat sources by using a combination of holding dams and distributed outlet pipes - that's the sort of thing that's done with nuclear power plants on rivers. The "passive heat exchangers" would be cooling towers, they come in small sizes as well as large and you can see the small ones as part of large air conditioning installations - however the entire point of siting next to a Fjord is to have cold water and a really huge heatsink! The water goes through and the surrounding environment is not measurably heated up if it's done properly.
Speaking of obligatory references... if we have a car analogy in this thread, can we make sure that the car is a fjord please?
The aluminum/gallium/hydrogen cycle is incredibly inefficient and expensive. But don't let that get in the way of the "neato" factor. :P
He's really very... gentle... and fuzzy. We're becoming fast friends.
Is there a good introductory text on total lifecycle considerations?
That is, 55-year-old cars are driving around Cuba, spewing last-mile pollution* into the air. Somewhere else, one Cuban Buick could be represented by ~8-10 "new" cars over the years (each of which would have simultaneously served as used cars for someone else for a while). Somewhere else might be a planned-city built from nothing, but based around long-lasting mass transportation vehicles.
* Please spread this term around if it is not already in circulation.
Their they're doing there hair.
Warm water of a data center won't change the temperature of the ocean at all.
Not the whole ocean, but as I said, it could affect the local environment.
But any way, what is the other option?
Did I say they shouldn't put warm water in the ocean?
What should be done, in all circumstances, is a study on the environmental impact. Such a thing may find (for example) that the original design releases the water in a secluded shallow bay where there is little circulation. As you said, a simple fix would be to make a longer pipe and release the water in deeper water, where there are stronger currents.
Environmentalism is not about doing nothing because well everything affects the environment. It is doing the optimal thing based on scientific evidence.
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
The results of the research, performed by the government agency for fisheries (not the nuclear industry) actually indicates that, on balance, fish growth is actually promoted, as are many other species of birds etc.
In fact that very report says that in the short term opportunistic species will rise at the cost of the more vulnerable species and in the long run all species (biomass) will decrease
Why would venting heat to the atmosphere be unproblematic but venting it to seawater be potentially problematic ?
RennesÃy isn't some deep-and-narrow inlet, infact it's hardly in a fjord at all, but more akin to in open ocean. Have a look at the map: http://g.co/maps/ucfvs
Heating the ocean itself by dumping waste heat, would take *tremendous* amounts of power, many orders of magnitude more energy than any data-center could possibly use.
*screams of hysteria* But more seriously, that is a problem with environmentalists
Really seriously, this is a problem with assholes who put words in the mouths of environmentalists, and pillory them for positions they never took.
And to the original original asshole who started this thread: the word is "cue" not queue.
I wonder if someone would calculate how much power/heat would be needed to raise the temperature enough to affect it.
I would be more worried about the marine life being affected more than the heat generated.
And speaking of marine life, remember how environmentalists were worried about such things as salmon and dams?
Remember how environmentalists are worried about eroding soil and hurricanes?
You know what... look at the history of what "environmentalists" have saved us from, and then come back and say something.
If it wasnt for them, we would be drinking firewater(literal firewater), sucking in coal ash, and dealing with randomly placed toxins.
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...
Don't use umlaut on the word "fjord". We don't in Norway and neither should you. In fact, umlaut are not even used in Norwegian. If you are thinking of ø or æ or å they are Norwegian vowels but do not apply in this case.
I'm not an environmentalist, but yeah, where does the heated water go? I don't think they will dump it back into the fjord directly.. But even a few degrees more being poured back into the fjord for a long time can be devastating to the enviroment, and not only the direct enviroment, but also nearby.. In the end the joke's on us and we'll have to deal with the consequences..
How do they afforjd this?
(PS... Want to buy some bütter?)
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
As for the transport of electricity I think there already is an excellent method. Aluminum Gallium power sources produce hydrogen from water and all you would need to do is ship them back to a Nuclear power plant where it would be vastly more efficient to remove the Oxygen to recondition the power source.
Wait. We can put an electric potential between two cables and pull energy out hundreds or even thousands of kilometers away. Instead, you want to ship aluminum ingots back and forth across the country. What. The. Fuck.
Nice post.
I am an avid environmentalist. According to you, I don't support Nuclear power in my backyard. Yet, I actually support it.
I am an avid environmentalist too because pollution harms me directly. I am against nuclear power because I don't trust the people in charge of designing or running it, but apparently that makes me hysterical in the GP's eyes.
As for the transport of electricity I think there already is an excellent method. Aluminum Gallium
Actually this is a solved problem. You can use long range DC line transmission with low loss. The EU is planning to run them from north African solar thermal plants back to western Europe.
Short term pain == Long term gain
Agreed, governments need the backbone to enact strong laws that make the short term pain of NOT doing anything worse than the short term gain of cleaning up.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Could be they're taking the water deep enough that the temperature stays constant. Although, it would be even lower then, about 2-4C, I believe.
Having just had a "doh"-moment, I'll reply to my own post. They are obviously not using the water from the very top ocean layers. The temperatures near the seabed are probably much more steady throughout the year and will certainly not be 18+ during nice summer days.
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.
In Soviet Russia, the Spanish Inquisition doesn't expect you!
I think most environmentalists are more rational than you are describing. Yes, there are a few loudmouth, as there are in any politically or socially charged group, but those are the outliers. Also, most environmentalists I know avoid those EVs and tend to stick to smaller cars instead. The EVs target the people who like to think they are helping the environment, and want to have a showpiece to say for it.
Being economically competitive tends to mean being one of the more profitable options - the problem with this, is it takes a lot more work to minimize negative environmental impact (notice, I said negative, not all). That's one of the reasons many environmental groups try to get laws passed to tax or otherwise reduce the economic viability of things that do have negative impact - without this, the environmentally friendly options will very rarely be economically competitive. The way I see it - I'd rather have a world that is habitable than a world with more extremely wealthy people and a few extra luxury goods on the market. By the time the general public are willing to make a change with their wallets rather than legal code, it will be too late, it is the "someone else can do it" mentality that so motivates the human race.
That being said, so long as the temperature increase in the fjord and nearby sea isn't increased to the point that native flora/fauna is killed - and with this level of cooling, it likely will be fine. The heating should actually improve the biota of the fjord, provided there is sufficient water movement to keep the water column oxygenated properly, and to keep the algae within the fjord from getting too high. Again, from a brief reading, I doubt the latter two would be a serious problem.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
With those dams and outlet pipes, is there a heat transfer to the surrounding environment, particularly air? Yes - you have your heat exchange.
Is there a high energy mechanism (fan, pump, etc) set up to increase the transfer rate? No - you have passive.
That's a form of passive heat exchange.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
The people in charge of designing and running the plants are not the problem. I've known a lot of people in that field. Very smart, very thoughtful.
The problem is the politicians who make the decisions don't have a fucking clue. They then decide to cut budgets, put things in bad locations, etc. The people designing, building and running them don't have the options or resources available to alleviate the issues. They can write reports and make suggestions, but the politicians and bureaucrats tend to ignore these.
Put a plant away from any place that's got an active fault line, and at least 20km from an ocean (with some adjustment for altitude), and you shouldn't have a problem. A modern plant least has triple redundancy and safety features that quash the reaction is they lose power (or are told to do so).
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
I wonder if someone would calculate how much power/heat would be needed to raise the temperature enough to affect it.
Considering that this "Fjord" Is actually the east side of a small island which has the North Sea on the west side - a huge amount!
This is blinging
Toronto has been using this technology for years (http://www.enwave.com/district_cooling_system.html), taking water from deep in Lake Ontario and cooling office towers downtown. No worry about the lake warming up - it gets refereshed every year with this thing called "Winter".
If the anti-environmentalists were in charge of overseeing human development, well, the Sahara would be a desert, Ohio would be a wasteland, and the Tigris/Euphrates area would be a salt-laden chain of abandoned cities.
Oh wait...
This is a really good and valid concern, we have a small spring fed pond that is ~20 acres that has native brook trout, they thrive in this cool water (this species no more than 55F for happy fish, water ~48F fresh out of the ground in the middle of the summer). I did the math on what it would take in energy to kill them because we wanted to run a circulator and exchanger for low cost air conditioning. There really isn't anyway we could actually kill them given the thermal mass of the water and how fast it is refreshed from the ground. But if you keep going with the math, something like a datacenter could easily kill all the fish, or at the very least greatly hinder there lively-hood.
neorush
Economically competitive is just a cop out. What it really means, is that you have a limited commitment towards change. In my personal view, which has had heated debates, we are fucked already. Leave economics out of it and make the hard decisions now. That does mean start building as many nuclear reactors as possible right now because they are the most immediate solution to massive amounts of power generation that can be used immediately for heating, cooling, industry, etc.
I suspect you misunderstand economics. Throw out any ideas of economics being about $'s, the $ is only used in economics as a unit of measurement, and even then only a proxy. Economics is concerned with "the distribution of scarce resources", leading to the principle objectives being improving efficiency (of allocation) and/or increasing the availability of resources (i.e. reducing scarcity). There is no stated time constraint, the implication is you should consider the entire period that it is possible to do any kind of planning for.
When people try to argue against environmentalism using "economics", they generally either misrepresent the problem as being entirely the unrelated moral issues, or constrain economics into a short timeframe and selfish perspective. This is to totally ignore the problem. Aside from moral considerations, the entire human aspect of the environmental problem is an economic one.
Pure economic argument is almost entirely on the side of rational environmentalism (emphasis on rational, since "environmentalism" is a generalisation almost to the point of absurdity; there is no common standard of where the balance lies between pro and anti, there is no common standard of values).
If you consume 100 units of scarce resource now at the cost of 100u of same later it is a net nil on the "scarcity" objective, all you've done is decided the allocation. So what is the net position for allocation objective then? This is where it gets more interesting. If the future is going to be more plentiful then it is reasonable to assume the better allocation is to consume those resources now, but if the future is going to be bleak then we should save those resources. Everyone knows a tin of beans is more valuable to a starving man than the same tin is to a well-fed one. I dare say men of science agree that the future is looking relatively bleak.
Pretty much the entire situation can be thought of using that principle. Oil obviously fits easily into the above illustration, but it's fundamentally the same when we're talking about cooling data-centres now at a cost of fish in future. Cheap energy now at a cost of clean air and other pollution effects. "Resources" is meant very generally, encompassing all bringers-of-utility whether it be oil, fish, clean air or much less tangible things.
Now, there's two big caveats. Well, not caveats, but important factors that are bloody difficult to incorporate into the planning. Firstly, technological innovation. This can lead to both increased absolute availability of resources and improved allocation. For example, cheap, efficient solar panels may result in a greater power availability, particularly for dispersed settlements where plants are ill-suited, while freeing up oil for other uses. However innovation generally requires resource consumption now, not just consumption in the course of research but also for the economic conditions to spur research investment. While the Bush administration argued it to a ridiculous extreme, it's still totally valid to put some weight on the importance of the present over the future. The difficulty is how much weight to place on so much uncertainty?
Secondly, economic competitiveness. This is actually a valid factor for consideration, not just for selfish reasons but because it impacts both the allocation and scarcity of available resources. It's not so much economic competitiveness per se, but how it ties into economic efficiency. An economy that is not economically efficient is n