EverWind said it will use a closed-loop water-glycol system. The company’s preliminary estimate for water usage is an average of 100,000 litres per day for the first phase and 500,000 litres of water per day including both phases.
A “closed-loop” that uses 100,000 litres per day doesn’t sound that closed.
As for the wind power, Everwind doesn’t appear to have even started construction on any of its planned wind farms and it’s likely the data centre will be completed well before they get any wind power online.
And this is all in service to an American company, completely throwing away the “sovereignty” justification for local data centres.
Yeah, even with that water usage it’s tiny compared to evaporative. Even 500K per day is on the very low end of industrial plants water usage, from what I gather.
E: Also I don’t know if this 500K liters disappeara like it does with evaporation or whether it’s returned for treatment and reuse. I’d assume if it isn’t horribly poisoned with something like PFAS, it would be returned to the lake via the treatment plant.
Maybe, no idea how that works exactly. Perhaps internal prop-glyc loop coupled with utility water via heat exchanger? Continuously draw water from the tap, run it through the heat exchanger till hot, then return it to the utility via the sewage drain?
Beats me but I’d assume if they’re adding stuff to the water and maybe treating it for their internal systems, it would make sense to recycle it internally and just top off for losses rather than some “total loss” system.
The article says “propylene glycol closed loop” so my most sane interpretation is that whatever cools the actual machines is that. Then whatever cools that propylene glycol should be the tap water. Kinda how some nukes are cooled. Inner water loop with that goes into the reactor, cools the core, gets irradiated, then that’s cooled by outer water loop that cools the inner loop water. That way radiation is kept from contaminating the water coming out of the reactor. The heat is tranferred from one loop into the other via heat exchanger.
If the DC is keeps the water and recycles it, they gotta reject the heat from it somehow, that would mean heat pumps. Maybe? That’s more energy and money tho.
If there’s a huge nerd with too much time among us, they could compute how much heat 100000 liters of cold water can absorb till they heat to “hot water.” Then cross reference that against the expected heat produced by the initial DC chip capacity and check whether the two numbers are within the realm of comparable per day. 🤭
A “closed-loop” that uses 100,000 litres per day doesn’t sound that closed.
As for the wind power, Everwind doesn’t appear to have even started construction on any of its planned wind farms and it’s likely the data centre will be completed well before they get any wind power online.
And this is all in service to an American company, completely throwing away the “sovereignty” justification for local data centres.
There’s nothing sovereign abt this for sure.
Yeah, even with that water usage it’s tiny compared to evaporative. Even 500K per day is on the very low end of industrial plants water usage, from what I gather.
E: Also I don’t know if this 500K liters disappeara like it does with evaporation or whether it’s returned for treatment and reuse. I’d assume if it isn’t horribly poisoned with something like PFAS, it would be returned to the lake via the treatment plant.
Is 100000 liters/day the flow rate of the closed loop?
Maybe, no idea how that works exactly. Perhaps internal prop-glyc loop coupled with utility water via heat exchanger? Continuously draw water from the tap, run it through the heat exchanger till hot, then return it to the utility via the sewage drain?
Beats me but I’d assume if they’re adding stuff to the water and maybe treating it for their internal systems, it would make sense to recycle it internally and just top off for losses rather than some “total loss” system.
The article says “propylene glycol closed loop” so my most sane interpretation is that whatever cools the actual machines is that. Then whatever cools that propylene glycol should be the tap water. Kinda how some nukes are cooled. Inner water loop with that goes into the reactor, cools the core, gets irradiated, then that’s cooled by outer water loop that cools the inner loop water. That way radiation is kept from contaminating the water coming out of the reactor. The heat is tranferred from one loop into the other via heat exchanger.
If the DC is keeps the water and recycles it, they gotta reject the heat from it somehow, that would mean heat pumps. Maybe? That’s more energy and money tho.
If there’s a huge nerd with too much time among us, they could compute how much heat 100000 liters of cold water can absorb till they heat to “hot water.” Then cross reference that against the expected heat produced by the initial DC chip capacity and check whether the two numbers are within the realm of comparable per day. 🤭