Hi there everyone,
Let me start this by saying that this is an honest question. I figure nobody would be better suited to answer my question than a group laser-focused on the negatives of the technology.
I see these types of memes a lot and see statistics of gallons consumed in a lot of articles I read. What I don't understand though is where the water goes that it can't be reclaimed or naturally return from a gas to a liquid.
As a kid(long ago), I was taught of the cycle of rain and the conversion between gases and liquid. It's my understanding that when a liquid is used to cool something, it also follows the same conversion process as it cools.
Could someone explain to me what's going on in this process where the 264 billion gallons of water used in the meme do not return to a liquid state?
I would appreciate any insight into the process that seems to defy this cycle that I am missing. Like I said prior, my knowledge of this process ended in middle school science class so I'm confident that I'm missing something.
Thanks for your time!
Put a straw in your hand.
Get a mouthful of ice cold water
Blow it through the straw out the other side.
Feel it cool your hand? See how its dispersed out to god knows the fuck where? Never returning in any significant volume to replenish the cup it was drawn from
Thats basically whats going on.
Billions of gallons of drinkable water, wasted because data centers didnt want to pay the extra cost for a closed loop cooling system. putting enormous strain on water systems that are already at or beyond their breaking points and are not able to replenish at even a fraction of the rate that they are being drained from.
even closed loop can only recycle the same water so many times
Industrial closed loops rarely use water. and will last a very long time. besides, lets be generous and just assume its running nothing but water water and some anticorosive additives. it will run on that water for a very long time, and changing out that water once a year is still trillions of gallons less than what would be consumed otherwise.
It's like your car's radiator. They flush their systems occasionally, but it's really not much... at least not locally. Who knows what's going on at the power plant where the electricity is being generated? Arid states should be strictly requiring closed loop systems of data centers and electricity producers alike.
It's not an extra cent for a closed loop cooling system and your straw analogy is closer to closed loop in how it works. They use open loop because vaporising water takes a lot more energy than heating water. You get a lot of more cooled. The alternative is to run a ton more AC at lower efficiency since the hot side of the AC won't be cooled fast enough.
They're doing it to use less electricity since electricity is expensive. In a way, it's a good thing. Until you factor in droughts