Americans across multiple states are being urged to conserve water as drought conditions intensify, reservoirs shrink, and utilities issue increasingly urgent warnings. At the same time, a different kind of consumer is quietly demanding unprecedented...
Because recycling the water would require condensing it, and the laws of thermodynamics necessitates that the energy that was taken away into the water by the phase change from water to vapor must be taken back out of the vapor in order to change it back into water.
That’s to say, in order to get the water back that was evaporated to cool something, you must cool the water the same amount that it cooled your other thing. This makes recovering the water completely pointless as you have to do the exact same amount of cooling again to recover it.
Data centers use evaporative cooling because it’s cheap. Not recovering the water is what makes it cheap. They can use cooling methods that don’t rely on disposing of water to the atmosphere (like heat pumps), but it’s not cheap.
Data centers use evaporative cooling because it’s cheap. Not recovering the water is what makes it cheap.
This is where regulations need to step in. The extra cost of non-evaporarive cooling is not going to make or break the datacenter, but it might cut into the CEO’s bonus. Make them pay for it! They’ve got the money.
This is the part where you need to realize that regulations only come into play long after devastating impacts occur and can’t be denied any longer (or, more accurately, until they can be denied again. See, the state of anti-trust in the US). Capitalism only exists because it can foist externalities onto the public. And capitalism will do anything to avoid paying for the externalities that allow them to “generate” profits.
Because recycling the water would require condensing it, and the laws of thermodynamics necessitates that the energy that was taken away into the water by the phase change from water to vapor must be taken back out of the vapor in order to change it back into water.
That’s to say, in order to get the water back that was evaporated to cool something, you must cool the water the same amount that it cooled your other thing. This makes recovering the water completely pointless as you have to do the exact same amount of cooling again to recover it.
Data centers use evaporative cooling because it’s cheap. Not recovering the water is what makes it cheap. They can use cooling methods that don’t rely on disposing of water to the atmosphere (like heat pumps), but it’s not cheap.
This is where regulations need to step in. The extra cost of non-evaporarive cooling is not going to make or break the datacenter, but it might cut into the CEO’s bonus. Make them pay for it! They’ve got the money.
This is the part where you need to realize that regulations only come into play long after devastating impacts occur and can’t be denied any longer (or, more accurately, until they can be denied again. See, the state of anti-trust in the US). Capitalism only exists because it can foist externalities onto the public. And capitalism will do anything to avoid paying for the externalities that allow them to “generate” profits.