Hmm. If a city had some system of central heating, would a data center’s waste heat be used during winter months? I’ve heard of projects to use abandoned mines flooded with water as a sort of thermal battery, could that also be a solution?
As Data Centers Proliferate, Illinois Communities Grapple with How to Supply the Necessary Water
Submitted 19 hours ago by Davriellelouna@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16062025/illinois-data-centers-water-use/
Comments
gil2455526@lemmy.eco.br 2 hours ago
Zarxrax@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
How about water usage rates that penalize bulk consumers instead of giving them cheaper rates?
jumping_redditor@sh.itjust.works 1 hour ago
big farmer wouldn’t like this, and big farmer gives America the corn syrup it needs to survive
AdamEatsAss@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Woah woah woah. Those billion dollar companies are investing in our town, that’s why we are giving them the equivalent of millions of dollars a year for free. -s
belit_deg@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
How about reducing our dependence on data centres by using software that is more peer to peer and local first etc?
Of course some data centres have legitimate use cases, such as big data analysis on weather and climate data etc, but building huge data centres for social media and running everything in the cloud is silly from an environmental perspective
drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 hours ago
Distributed computing would eliminate the water usage, since the heat output wouldn’t be so highly concentrated, but it would probably somewhat increase power consumption.
In an ideal world I think data center waste heat would be captured for use in a district thermal grid / seasonal thermal energy store like the one in Vantaa.
belit_deg@lemmy.world 25 minutes ago
If I’m having a video meeting p2p instead of microsoft teams running in the cloud, that would reduce power consumption, not increase it.
Master167@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
In an ideal world I think data center waste heat would be captured for use in a district thermal grid / seasonal thermal energy store like the one in Vantaa.
Yes, this would be the ideal for dealing with that issue. Re-use that heat to generate some of the energy the data center is demanding.
Imagine there’s an engineering & physics issue to be solved. But where would we find those top talent people to solve it?
jim3692@discuss.online 5 hours ago
No, we need massive data centers for LLMs and data analysis for targeted ads /s
bravesilvernest@lemmy.ml 19 hours ago
Might be better to not allow them in the first place…
wise_pancake@lemmy.ca 18 hours ago
I definitely agree that if the logistics don’t make any sense then you shouldn’t build them there.
~Side note: this is also why I think Florida, Nevada, and Arizona shouldn’t have hockey teams. It’s an affront to nature.~
nondescripthandle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 18 hours ago
As much as the Florida and Vegas hater I am when it comes to hockey, the seasons are played so late into spring these days almost every team but Winnipeg is going to be affronting nature. Ill give you that florida humidity and heat must really be the worst of the worst though.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 11 hours ago
What do datacenters need large volumes of running water for? Can they not do a continuous loop? It’s for cooling computers, right? That can’t be done with a closed loop of water?
Railcar8095@piefed.social 10 hours ago
A closed loop just moves away the heat, you still need to cool the water, else it keeps rising in temperature until it doesn't cool enough. On desktops this can be achieved with fans, which isn't surprising as waterless setups of fans can already cool down most desktop CPUs.
On a data center (and power plants), this is not feasible as they generate too much heat. They would need massive fans and would raise the air temperature like crazy.captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 9 hours ago
My next thought would be to find a use for the heat; colocate the data center with some other facility that needs massive quantities of heat. I remember something about a spa that heated its pools with computers (I think mining bitcoin, but still). I’ve also been curious if heat pumps could get hot enough to bake bread at industrial scales. Pump heat out of a data center and into a bigass bread oven?
tal@lemmy.today 11 hours ago
It takes more work to avoid salt buildup, but you can evaporate saltwater as a place to dump heat, and we aren’t gonna run out of saltwater any time soon. 'Course, only so many places have saltwater access.
Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
The problem with salt water isn’t salt buildup, it’s that salt water is corrosive and will drastically shorten the lifespan of any equipment exposed to it.
UniversalBasicJustice@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 hours ago
Also, good luck sourcing salt water in Illinois.
tal@lemmy.today 10 hours ago
You don’t pipe salt water through the data center. You have a heat exchanger that touches the salt water.
hoch@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
All water is drinking water if you’re brave enough
A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 4 hours ago
Sorry to say but this is just one aspect of dropping out of all climate contracts national, international and global. And yes, AI is making this much worse.
Think about that the next time you “ask ChatGPT” something.
Just one more reason not to use servers located in the USA for anything.