Dirty water is bad for cooling equipment
Zarxrax@lemmy.world 1 year ago
If it’s just for cooling, wouldn’t they just be able to pull water directly from a lake and then return the same water into the lake? Why is any consumption happening?
bladerunnerspider@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Zarxrax@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Well, building on that question, why do they need a constant supply of clean water? My desktop PC has a water cooler, and it just recirculates the same water.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Because that’s expensive to build on this scale. They’d have to cool the water back down again.
It’s cheaper to just run cold tapwater in at a fast rate, and dump the hot water intothe sewer.
Which is why we need laws that go after industries that use insane amounts of water, if we don’t it causes shortages and everyone’s rate to go up
Nougat@kbin.social 1 year ago
It’s cheaper to just run cold tapwater in at a fast rate, and dump the hot water into the sewer.
There should be a cost to corporations using municipal water supplies for purposes unrelated to direct consumption for drinking, cooking, washing, toilets. You shouldn't be able to use it for cooling only, and you shouldn't be able to bottle and resell it.
netburnr@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Sounds like they are using evaporation cooling towers for the air chillers.
kitonthenet@kbin.social 1 year ago
It’s evaporative cooling, big cooling towers
kalleboo@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Power plants use lake water directly for cooling - they use a heat exchanger
GigglyBobble@kbin.social 1 year ago
Do it like a power plant with a closed on a disconnected open loop. It's not exactly a new problem.
bhmnscmm@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The water isn’t being consumed. It’s going through the same process all the water in the city is going through.
Pulled from the river, cleaned, used for cooling at the data centers, and returned to the river via the waste water system.
The only loss is the energy/resources to treat the water.
chaorace@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
In theory, yes. Of course, the same holds true for a lot of things which we currently use clean water for! The water needs of agriculture, toilets, carwashes, and many more could be addressed through so-called graywater (e.g.: pumped lakewater, rooftop rainwater) if we really sat down and wanted to make it happen.
The reason that we don’t do these things is rather mundane: it’s cheaper and easier to tap into the shared drinking water infrastructure than it is to collect your own water and roll your own silos/filtration tech. That might change as the world changes – something has to give eventually if we use more groundwater than we replenish, but much like clean drinking water, I don’t think it’s a problem we should ask individual entities to solve. Governments would generally be much more suited to efficiently collecting drainwater, scrubbing it, distributing it, and mandating usage in wasteful commercial applications.
hoodatninja@kbin.social 1 year ago
A lot of problems we don’t solve boil down to “it’s boring and expensive” lol it’s sad when you think about it
LetMeEatCake@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I wonder what the practical implementation would be here. I assume current water infrastructure is two sets of pipes, one for clean water and one for wastewater. Would the solution here be to add a third parallel set of pipes for greywater?
flipht@kbin.social 1 year ago
It probably doesn't make sense to do infrastructure -wide duplication for a greywater system. That would be a lot of pipe and possible leaks in places where that resource isn't needed.
Smaller loops make more sense for specific needs like this. It just needs to be legislated - over a certain size, you need to pump, filter if required for your application, and then dump in accordance with whatever rules we set. If local governments want, they can subsidize this through tax breaks - we already have robust systems for giving corporations money back, we just need to tie it to the types of performance we need to see, whether that be environmental improvements, job creation/retention, etc.