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Google gets OK to siphon water for South Carolina plant
21–30 of 70 posts
Re: Google gets OK to siphon water for South Carolina plant
#22> "We strive to build sustainability into everything that we do" I very much hope at least a part of the heat is converted back to electrical energy...
This isn’t always practical.
Re: Google gets OK to siphon water for South Carolina plant
#23On one hand, at an industrial scale that isn't that much water: e.g. my local utility that serves 20,535 customer locations across 75 square miles provides about 2.2 billion gallons of water per year.
On the other hand, it's a fair amount of water for cooling... wag numbers ignoring the environmental conditions of their location (and water hardness) would have me guessing their load would be on the order 100 - 300 megawatts to need that much make-up water. Could be off by an order of magnitude, but clearly it's a lot of heat regardless.
Re: Google gets OK to siphon water for South Carolina plant
#24I'm sure that people who decided it were well compensated, who are you to disagree?
Extraordinary to claim that this decision is the result of corruption, you got any evidence or you just inventing stuff in your head?
Extraordinary? This happens all the time, maybe not with hard cash but plenty of other methods
Re: Google gets OK to siphon water for South Carolina plant
#25Wow using ground water to cool down computers? Is there no other water supply available? Ofc a Google rep says how they are environmentally committed. Obv they'd never say if they didn't give a shit. What a useless comment. Clean unpolluted ground water is probably the most precious resource there is.
Sewage (after treatment) can also be used to cool servers. Some big companies do this. I'd guess groundwater was cheaper than sewage in this specific location.
what about seawater?
i know that san onofre used to be cooled that way... or do they require basically non saline water for this...
Re: Google gets OK to siphon water for South Carolina plant
#26Re: Google gets OK to siphon water for South Carolina plant
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sewage (after treatment) can also be used to cool servers. Some big companies do this. I'd guess groundwater was cheaper than sewage in this specific location.
what about seawater? i know that san onofre used to be cooled that way... or do they require basically non saline water for this...
I would assume that they prefer to use "clean" ground water as opposed to sewage or seawater to minimize the buildup of waste or salt during the evaporation.
One would imagine the extra maintenance required would be very costly.
Re: Google gets OK to siphon water for South Carolina plant
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sewage (after treatment) can also be used to cool servers. Some big companies do this. I'd guess groundwater was cheaper than sewage in this specific location.
what about seawater? i know that san onofre used to be cooled that way... or do they require basically non saline water for this...
Saltwater is very expensive to use, since the remaining salt would clog evaporators, and the salt-concentrated water is pretty bad for the environment, so can't just be discharged.
Re: Google gets OK to siphon water for South Carolina plant
#29>...granted Google permission Wednesday to pump 549 million gallons of water out of the ground each year to cool servers at its sprawling plant in Berkeley County. >DHEC’s decision is the latest development in a bitter fight over whether the company should get state approval to withdraw from a major groundwater source that, critics say, is dwindling and in jeopardy of being further depleted. Just put the warmed water…
This water will be used in evaporative coolers. There won't be warmed water to return. The water gets recycled 50-100 times, and each time a small percentage evaporates into a cloud. The cloud really does make clouds.
Evaporative coolers in low country South Carolina? Is there a more humid place on Earth?
Re: Google gets OK to siphon water for South Carolina plant
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Extraordinary to claim that this decision is the result of corruption, you got any evidence or you just inventing stuff in your head?
Extraordinary? This happens all the time, maybe not with hard cash but plenty of other methods
It does but Google has a very very strict policy about not greasing wheels. People have been fired over it and not reimbursed for the out of pocket expense. It made building infrastructure in India take exponentially longer than competitors who were willing to play according to the unspoken rules. Google can't be trusted but not everything they do or every way they operate is bad.