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."

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: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: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: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 ?

[JO_DIE_THE_STAR_F***]

<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>

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: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: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 ?

[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:Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

This has a simple solution, like most problems if you care to cut the political bull out of it. Charge them a constant "per unit" rate for their peak load.

Use 100 gallons a day? $0.10 a gallon. Use 1,000 gallons a day? $0.15... Use 1,000,000 gallons a day? Charge them $1.00 a gallon. It's still cheaper than gasoline and works fine for moderate users.

They don't want to pay $1,000,000.00 for the 1,000,000 gallons/day they use? They buy it from someone else, using someone else's delivery system, not my tax subsidized tubes. It will increase the demand and thus viability for desalinization and water recycling. The water from the sinks in an office building can be used for this, they don't need to used potable water for everything...

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 ?

[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.

Re:Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

In a lot of (northern) European cities, the entire urban area is piped into a huge district heat system. For example most of the metropolitan Helsinki area is wired into one system. In the winter especially, the electric plants in the area can dump their heat into the district heating network, giving residents cheap heating and hot water, and turning that 35% efficient boiler (electricity) into a nearly 100% efficient one (electricity + heat). Its brilliant.