Apparently data centers routinely burn through water at a rate of about 1.9 liters per KWh of energy spent computing. Yet I can 🎮 HARDCORE GAME 🎮 on my hundreds-of-watts GPU for several hours, without pouring any of my Mountain Dew into the computer? Even if the PC is water cooled, the water cooling water stays in the computer, except for exceptional circumstances.
Meanwhile, water comes out of my A/C unit and makes the ground around it all muddy.
How am I running circles around the water efficiency of a huge AI data center, with an overall negative water consumption?
taps the fact that electricity is a steam reaction and even if you don’t see it, the electricity you’re using is made by decompressing water into vapor, whether by burning coal through turbines/boiled wind from water sources creating wind power/ even nuclear reactors are often a boiling water reaction going through turbines, creating a net loss of ‘water’ if we don’t have natural condensation utilities to convert ‘air’
that water usually goes through a heat exchanger in a closed loop. there’s a reason most power plants are built by lakes.
also, explain “boiled wind”?
If it’s truly a closed loop, why do you need a lake, a true closed loop has zero need for local water sources, else there’s some sort of negative that they’re compensating for which, in case of local water sources, there’s not enough infrastructure if any of that water OR HEAT leaves the system faster than it enters
to be the other end of the heat exchanger?
Water exchange above large bodies of water causes thermal dynamic exchanges deliberating speeds of wind currents
that’s not really a big factor.