> When you're using water in a open-loop data center, you get in cool/cold water, add biocides and other chemicals to protect your infrastructure, then heat it and pump it back to the body of water (i.e. river, lake or an underground hole, or somewhere).

These are not power plants, there are zero data centers using open loop cooling that discharge loop water back into a waterway. It’s unnecessary when you’re cooling a data center.

The system is filled with water and begins operating. As water is lost to evaporation in the cooling towers, more water is added to the cooling loop.

At no point is any of the cooling loop water discharged back into a waterway, it gets recirculated through the system.

All that being said, closed loop cooling is much better in areas with a lack of water.

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bayindirh 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm not sure, because of two reasons.

First, I don't see the banks of dry coolers or chillers required to cool that amount of water in many of the data center photos.

Second, our closed loop data center is not losing that amount of water, so losing 10 billion gallons of water to evaporation across that many data centers seems unrealistic, even with evaporation for humidity balancing and dry-cooler boosting reasons.

Sitting on top of a data center and directly working on it has its perks, apparently.

	▲	quickthrowman 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		“Open loop” cooling means there are evaporative cooling towers being used to cool the chilled water loop water: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_tower Adding evaporative cooling towers to a chilled water loop that uses chillers can double the efficiency. A power plant that draws water from an intake, uses it to reject heat, cools it down, and then discharges it back to the stream/lake/ocean is once-thru cooling.

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oersted 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Well the point of the article is that water usage is much worse in the power plant capacity necessary to feed datacenters.