I can’t wait until this legitimate concern over environmental issues meets up with the reality on the ground.
I work at a DC. We have closed-loop water cooling. We have the same amount of water as a single residential swimming pool in our pipes. It is RO, de-ionized and hyper pure, purchased and brought by a tanker truck. It was filled once, more than a year ago and no more has been “used” since. The toilets use far more water than the servers.
Other companies DO abuse the environment. We would welcome legislation requiring this practice (and others) to make it a level field. There is no need for any DC to behave badly.
I suspect the big ones use evaporative cooling because they’re trying to build in the gigawatt scale and IIRC there was talk about single racks reaching a megawatt soon, currently they’re ~150 kW.
The power density of those new nVIdia GPU compute servers is nuts and using evaporative cooling means less energy use than closed loop.
What I’m saying is, some of those planned datacenters wouldn’t be feasible with closed-loop water cooling. And yes, I agree with you that this should be legislated. If they can’t cool their servers without evaporating a bunch of drinking water, they can… have fewer servers.
Data centers can be built in a responsible way, but the big ones aren’t, instead they are built with the dirtiest and most resource consuming means possible because that is the only way to build them as fast as possible.
Responsibly built data centers of the future should be obliged not only to use closed loop systems but also actually use their huge amounts of heat instead of merely wasting it. Feeding distributed heating systems (or alternative ways of productively using that heat) should be obligatory. I know the situation is not the same as with gas power plants for example but it is incredibly wasteful not to use all that heat for something productive. We are talking about many MW here. For reference, the fairly sizeable waste incinerator plant Spittelau in Vienna has a capacity of 400 MW. There are currently data centers being built in the US with capacities higher than that and absolutely nothing productive is done with the waste heat.
Strict regulation is needed but not only that. Those gas turbines would be actually already illegal today. Laws are not enforced anymore for the oligarchs in the US. In other countries that nonsense would not fly already today.
We are known for building big ones fast. You just need to know how and execute with care an skill. Good people are expensive, and we pay well. So we charge more. And our customers know we hit all of our targets, so they are happy to pay.
The waste heat is difficult to use as it’s not that hot. We don’t have steam coming off the servers. They have to stay cool, after all. The water is significantly cooler than many domestic water heaters.
Gas turbines are a fucking nightmare. A move of despair. When our hens are running full bore during tests, we are well under 60dB. Our groundskeeping crew is significantly louder. And modern diesel is nothing like the majority of old trucks on the road today. No odor, no smoke, low-sulfur fuel, etc.
It can be done responsibly. We do it everyday. But trade secrets and NDAs keep us from speaking outside of anonymous forums like this.
Yeah the problems with all these data centers are largely solvable. The power usage part wouldn’t be an issue either if they were also investing in sufficient renewable sources to power these things, but instead when they don’t just dump the burden on whatever is already there they’re always reopening ancient coal plants or setting up gas turbines.
I can’t wait until this legitimate concern over environmental issues meets up with the reality on the ground.
I work at a DC. We have closed-loop water cooling. We have the same amount of water as a single residential swimming pool in our pipes. It is RO, de-ionized and hyper pure, purchased and brought by a tanker truck. It was filled once, more than a year ago and no more has been “used” since. The toilets use far more water than the servers.
Other companies DO abuse the environment. We would welcome legislation requiring this practice (and others) to make it a level field. There is no need for any DC to behave badly.
What’s the power scale of yours?
I suspect the big ones use evaporative cooling because they’re trying to build in the gigawatt scale and IIRC there was talk about single racks reaching a megawatt soon, currently they’re ~150 kW.
The power density of those new nVIdia GPU compute servers is nuts and using evaporative cooling means less energy use than closed loop.
What I’m saying is, some of those planned datacenters wouldn’t be feasible with closed-loop water cooling. And yes, I agree with you that this should be legislated. If they can’t cool their servers without evaporating a bunch of drinking water, they can… have fewer servers.
Data centers can be built in a responsible way, but the big ones aren’t, instead they are built with the dirtiest and most resource consuming means possible because that is the only way to build them as fast as possible.
Responsibly built data centers of the future should be obliged not only to use closed loop systems but also actually use their huge amounts of heat instead of merely wasting it. Feeding distributed heating systems (or alternative ways of productively using that heat) should be obligatory. I know the situation is not the same as with gas power plants for example but it is incredibly wasteful not to use all that heat for something productive. We are talking about many MW here. For reference, the fairly sizeable waste incinerator plant Spittelau in Vienna has a capacity of 400 MW. There are currently data centers being built in the US with capacities higher than that and absolutely nothing productive is done with the waste heat.
Strict regulation is needed but not only that. Those gas turbines would be actually already illegal today. Laws are not enforced anymore for the oligarchs in the US. In other countries that nonsense would not fly already today.
We are known for building big ones fast. You just need to know how and execute with care an skill. Good people are expensive, and we pay well. So we charge more. And our customers know we hit all of our targets, so they are happy to pay.
The waste heat is difficult to use as it’s not that hot. We don’t have steam coming off the servers. They have to stay cool, after all. The water is significantly cooler than many domestic water heaters.
Gas turbines are a fucking nightmare. A move of despair. When our hens are running full bore during tests, we are well under 60dB. Our groundskeeping crew is significantly louder. And modern diesel is nothing like the majority of old trucks on the road today. No odor, no smoke, low-sulfur fuel, etc.
It can be done responsibly. We do it everyday. But trade secrets and NDAs keep us from speaking outside of anonymous forums like this.
Yeah the problems with all these data centers are largely solvable. The power usage part wouldn’t be an issue either if they were also investing in sufficient renewable sources to power these things, but instead when they don’t just dump the burden on whatever is already there they’re always reopening ancient coal plants or setting up gas turbines.
We do invest in local electrical capacity.we always build more capacity than we use.
But that would cost more money! Then line might go up a little less! Won’t anybody think of the poor investors!
We do. Less local resistance=quicker build=more money sooner.