Comment by dragonwriter

Comment by dragonwriter 2 months ago

> The one near here just has heat exchanges. But even if all the others use evaporators then potential water usage is extremely misleading because its not like the water is consumed

Water consumption in all contexts is mostly fresh water returned from immediately usable form to either evaporation or the ocean. It is not "extremely misleading", because when it returns to immediately usable form by, e.g., precipitation, that's when new water is considered to be made available. The normal definitions are internally consistent and useful.

blkhawk 2 months ago

I did a bit of research and even water just "involved" in the process is counted as used in this context. For instance river water that is used for cooling and returned is counted.

I think these sort of graphs are simply misleading and should not be used.

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Forbo 2 months ago

Is that actually a common configuration? I could find very little on data centers being cooler by river water, and the few I found sounded like they were doing something novel.

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- stonogo 2 months ago
  
  Using natural water is more common in power plants, where the volume of water is sufficiently large to use concrete aquaducts and the precision of the temperature isn't as important. Most datacenter liquid cooling is treated municipal water with glycol additives to prevent corrosion and pump jamming.
  
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