Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:waste not want not (Score 1) 40

The energy input into burying all those pipes, replacing HVAC systems at all those houses and offices, and then operating the district heating system is massive.

I haven't seen a study but I imagine that you don't end up with a net energy savings for a long time, if ever. I would be thrilled to be wrong, and I would really enjoy reading such a study. Heck if I could get someone to pay me for it, I'd love to design and price such a system, that would be awesome. But I don't think it pencils out.

Comment Re:Significant figures fail (Score 1) 40

Also, it's not like the water is "spent" like fuel and can't be recycled; it's still the same H2O that went into the system, just somewhat warmer.

Pretty sure they're talking about water being evaporated. So yeah, it's kinda recycled, automatically. Although with a warming planet, absolute humidity is increasing - air is holding more water.

Data centers don't put "somewhat warmer" water down the drain, fwiw

Comment Re:WUE (Score 1) 79

increasing WUE often comes at the cost of decreased PUE - it takes more pumps or compressors (or something) to transfer the heat to the atmosphere using dry coolers.

The efficiency of a compressor is basically proportional to the square of the difference between its inlet and discharge temperatures (to highly simplify concepts of a refrigerant cycle).

Let's say your chilled water temperature is 60F (evaporator side).

Scenario 1, non-evaporative heat rejection: your condenser side is tied to the ambient dry bulb temperature + say 10F. So if it's 70F outside, then the condenser side is 80F.

Scenario 2: evaporative heat rejection: your condenser side is tied to the ambient wet bulb temperature + say 10F. So if it's 70F outside with a 50F wet bulb, then the condenser side is 60F.

The ambient wet-bulb temperature is always the same as or lower than the ambient dry-bulb temperature. So yeah, evaporative cooling makes your compressors more efficient.

Comment Re:But why? (Score 1) 79

Sure, but you don't have to do it that way. You can just take on cold water from a reservoir, cycle it through the heat exchangers and dump it back into a different spot in the reservoir.

There's no such thing as "just." In any case, restricting site selection to being near large water reservoirs would be a real problem.

Comment Re:Say what? (Score 1) 79

Why would you run a chiller loop at a temperature where you need anti-freeze? That would be extremely inefficient, cold water is cold enough for a heatpump chiller. Though I doubt they are even using a heatpump, it's probably just air cooling, with a water loop to get increased surface area where needed.

Air-cooled chillers sit outside and are not always turned on. Depending on the design conditions (climate), you can either add glycol to the chilled water loop, or you can apply heat trace to the exposed piping. I'd wager that glycol is rare in a chilled water loop and that heat trace is the dominant solution.

Water-cooled chillers will sit inside and require a secondary loop for their heat rejection. In the non-evaporative case (a la Microsoft's marketing here) you're using drycoolers. Again, not all drycoolers will be on all the time, and the same considerations apply - how do you prevent freezing. It's more common to see glycol on external loops to drycoolers.

So to your question, it's not about the temperature of a "chiller loop." It's about the pipe segments and equipment that are exposed to the environment that may have non-moving water in them.

I promise you, ever single thing you can think of on how to design these systems has been thought of and tried. If some sites have glycol in them - and some do - there was thought put into that decision, and someone weighed the pros and cons and made that call.

Comment Re:Say what? (Score 1) 79

Unless, of course, they normally use municipal drinking water for cooling. I'm pretty sure that's not the case though. Somebody please tell me they're not doing that...

Most data centers that use evaporation as their final heat rejection to the environment use municipal water as the water source. Some use grey water - reclaimed water from water treatment plants - but that's not common because the parallel distribution network of piping from water treatment plants is not typically as widespread.

Cooling data centers without evaporation does increase utility energy consumption, although the gap has tightened over time.

Slashdot Top Deals

An adequate bootstrap is a contradiction in terms.

Working...