txags92 said:JeremiahJohnson said:
I have worked in water treatment for quite a while. In that time I have looked over the treatment of several data centers dating back 15 years.
The water is used for cooling. It is far superior to use a water cooled system to air as water is a substantially better at absorbing heat. One of the ones I treated stored all the data for a giant O&G company. The server room was 40 degrees. If they lost water cooling, the room would heat to 120 degrees in 4 minutes and fry their servers and destroying their data for all drilling operations across the world.
Nothing I worked on was remotely as large or water intensive the ones we are building now. I do not see how we will be able to sustain the water usage unless we go away from more efficient evaporative cooling and build larger air cooled systems with closed water and refrigerant loops. This would help keep the water in a chilled loop like a DX unit. They are less efficient than a cooling tower but use substantially less water. If we go the cooling tower and chiller route for the cooling water, I think we need to build desalination plants and pull from the ocean. Texas does not have enough ground or surface water to satisfy what we are wanting to build, especially west of us. Desal plants are inefficient and expensive, but would save water.
Eventually I could see these types of data centers having their own water desal, cooling and wastewater plants that service that facility specifically. From there it would be interesting to see what they do with the highly salinated reject water as it could cause some issues. Probably inject it into SWD wells, like they do in O&G.
Sorry my rambling, but that's how my brain works, and I could be completely wrong. But note that Elons place is not this, but will probably still use a lot of cooling water for their systems. I just worry about land cost increasing in BCS because of it. Wish I owned a lot of land here. Look what it did in Taylor.
We have plenty of brackish groundwater that is easier to desal than seawater. Particularly out west, using desalinated brackish groundwater and deep injecting the brine will likely be part of providing the necessary water for the data centers they want to build. As we get to next generation modular molten salt reactor nuke plants in the coming decade, power issues will become nearly a non-issue was well.
I feel as if you are putting far too much faith in the feds to actually not restrict nukes to the point that they aren't much of a factor in the energy generation industry.
