Like they could cool their shit, and desalinate water with the waste heat. Provide water to dry areas. Like Baja or Texas. Bonus points if they could run off renewables. Seems like a win win
Like they could cool their shit, and desalinate water with the waste heat. Provide water to dry areas. Like Baja or Texas. Bonus points if they could run off renewables. Seems like a win win
It would be fine if they developed solar, used closed loop or geothermal systems, distributed waste heat and such as compensation. It honestly wouldn’t be a bad plan compared to other places, seeing how the copious sun, dry winters, and still relatively cheap land would be great for operations.
But no, they only want the absolute cheapest route out there.
They dont even need to hook up and construct a geothermal heat system for a community, either. There are giant sand heat batteries in norway to store excess heat that they then tap into their community heat systems.
These data centers could be responsible to build the giant sand battery and then be done with it, leaving the distribution to the municipality or state, but they aren’t even inclined to do that.
It sounds a little complex in a desert because (AFAIK) data centers produce relatively low-level heat, and in the summer the inlet side would need to be cooled significantly. This sounds like less of an issue in Norway with relatively low average temperatures.
The medium would be cheap as heck though.
Another confounding factor is the necessity of water cooling. I think data centers like evaporators because they can use dirt cheap and standard air cooled servers, and simply A/C the room with the evaporators, where more complex systems would need larger air heat exchangers and a well below ambient return.
Nahh, there’s too much power density in modern servers for air cooling. They have either closed or open loop water cooling that simply dumps the heat in to more water. Or worse, just dumps the previously potable water that was used to directly cool the servers out in the open to evaporate.