Immersion-cooled colo is coming to Ohio... via a crypto-mining datacenter A datacenter being built in Ohio will reportedly be the first in the US to deploy two-phase immersion cooling – but only a portion of the facility will be used for HPC colocation with rest used to mine cryptocurrency. The facility is being built by Standard Power, with liquid cooling company LiquidStack supplying the hardware …
So when do we put Carbon Taxes on them along with forcing them to use cooling towers before introducing the thermal pollution into the river ecosystem? I wonder what kind of environmental studies Ohio required them to do before green lighting this project? Which then you have to look into who ran the environmental studies and lined their pockets along with the politicians.
So long as the river isn't being warmed enough to bother the fish I don't think it matters. It would require either a MUCH bigger datacenter or a very small river for that to be an issue. Some back of the envelope calculations indicate you'd need 300 of these datacenters to raise the temperature of the Mississippi 1F, so as long as the river used is larger than 1/300th the flow of the Mississippi you wouldn't even get a one degree rise.
You can't use ALL a river's flow, of course, so you'd have spot heating where the exchange is located. However it would quickly disperse through the rest of the water and before long into the atmosphere. Probably within a few miles, depending on how turbulent the river's flow is. You realize that plenty of industrial plants dump warm water into rivers right? Most with added pollution, at least this water would be clean with heat as the only "pollution".
52MW is enough to heat ~12 cubic metres of water 1 degree celsius per second.
- Specific heat capacity of water is ~4200J/kg/deg
Flow rate of the mississippi is about 17 thousand cubic metres of water per second (into the gulf)
- https://www.nps.gov/miss/riverfacts.htm
So to heat the mississippi by a degree F you'd need ~17000/12 * 1.8(c/f conversion) => two and half thousand of these facilities.
The major assumption is that the heat is evenly distributed amongst the entire mass flow, which feels reasonable within a relatively short distance from the facility.
The second major question is "what bothers the fish" because things like the solubility of oxygen in water is reduced as temperature increases.
So the assumption is based on using the entire flow? That's just silly. It will be locally pumped and discharged at much higher temperature which will cause local change in conditions for a significant length of the river. This may not seem much but the *secondary* cooling of a nearby nuclear reactor using a flow of 34m^3 of seawater per second causes locally increases in temperature of up to 2C which causes significant impact on the local flora and fauna - and that's discharge into the open ocean not into a constrained flow.
The thermal gradient around the plant will exist, but that will be a very localised effect. Looking at the river as a whole, there is a small effect that a localised temperature difference might have by making it hard for fish etc. to pass through the affected region, but I struggle to see that being particularly significant here.
How many miles down a fairly turbulent water flow would you expect a relevant gradient to persist?
Using the whole mass flow is done to account for the fact for the vast majority of the river the effect will be distributed amongst the entire mass flow.
The presence of buildings at all is likely to have a significant impact on the local environment anyway - even if it didn't directly connect to the river it would significantly affect runoff etc.
> Capes added that heat rejection from air-cooled systems will be run through river water that's pulled in, heated, and dumped back in the river to minimize its impact.
Putting warm water back into a river is guaranteed to have a significant impact on the aquatic ecosystem. How many degrees warmer does he envisage?
[Icon: Won't someone think of the wildlife?] :-)
The nuclear power plant I grew up near (Wikipedia link) uses Mississippi River water.
Straight from linked page: "The Monticello section of the Mississippi River remains unfrozen during winter and attracts hundreds of trumpeter swans, largely due to warm water discharged by the nuclear plant."
But there are benefits also: It increases aquatic plant and fish populations, which also draws more tourism via recreational fishing, which Monticello businesses don't mind.
A quick look at Coshocton, OH on Google Earth shows that in Cantwell Run, which is just below the point where two rivers join to become the Muskingum River, the combined river is only 80m wide and appears to be quite slow flowing. IOW its heat removal capacity doesn't look all that large: certainly not when compared to the Mississippi, which is over 600m wide at St Louis and navigable as far north as Montana.
So, who's for precooked catfish? Looks they could become freely available just downstream of that nice, eco-friendly water cooled data centre.
>So, who's for precooked catfish?
Chinese carp. Americanized Chinese carp, which have this weird mutation that makes them jump out of the water if they hear a noise. The flip side is that they have just ravaged the ecosystem, so killing them off would fix some problems.
>But there are benefits also: It increases aquatic plant and fish populations, which also draws more tourism via recreational fishing, which Monticello businesses don't mind.
And the biggest benefit of all - it allows manchildren with more money than brains to trade imaginary links to pictures of cartoon apes back-and-forth with each other! What higher purpose could anything have, you cynic?
> Straight from linked page: "The Monticello section of the Mississippi River remains unfrozen during winter and attracts hundreds of trumpeter swans, largely due to warm water discharged by the nuclear plant."
Those swans used to be somewhere else, generating tourist revenue for somewhere else.
There is a certain amount of energy generated, some from renewables and some not but electrons are all the same.
So because they use "green power" other consumers that would otherwise have had their power from renewables instead get it from fossil plants.
Unless their system is using windmills, hydro or solar that they built for this purpose and are not connected to the grid, any claims that it is not environmentally harmful are spurious.
Climate change cannot be fixed with creative accountancy.
Absolutely correct, but overlooks the elephant in the room.
The buildout of renewable sources is not even keeping pace with the growth in energy demand globally. Anyone who thinks that fossil fuel consumption is going anywhere in the next couple of generations (hah!) is a fairytale idealist with their head up their arse.
What doesn't help here is that the "developing world" (YMMV) has an exemption on all the eco targets and fossil power is quicker and cheaper to build out. The seriously daft bit is that it's far simpler to build renewable infrastructure from scratch than it is to migrate from a fossil infrastructure. In theory, every dollar spent on renewables in the developing world is worth several times one spent in the west in terms of long term impact. In practice "postcolonial guilt" trumps common sense.
So calling what is being done creative accountancy is being generous with the word "creative".
I think you are missing the point "MW" on it's own is a meaningless value, it needs to be power per duration to have any significant meaning so MWh (MegaWattHour) is the probable unit intended.
Really I'm surprised El Reg would make such a fundamental error but there you go.
"But is that 52mph per hour or per day?"
Either way it's a rather slow rate of acceleration.
Perhaps El Reg could introduce a quick filter such that any first post involving terms like "MW" would require a response to "are these units?"
a) absolute
b) per-unit
c) differential
d) SI units are part of a French conspiracy
to be answered correctly.
Obvs I will have messed up somewhere in there so I am AC.
Either way it's a rather slow rate of acceleration.
Indeed, although at some point during a reasonable acceleration phase it will be true, although I would imagine that the jerk would be quite high, so it wouldn't be at that for very long (and is therefore a ridiculous unit).
IMNSHO, there's a flaw in the calculation. 40MW is not the thermal flux evacuated, it's the power required by the cooling system to work. At best we could estimate the heat generated by the cooling system itself, but we cannot tell from this value how much heat is transferred from the primary system by the cooling system.
They built it in Amish country. They built a crypto mining data center, in Amish country.
I'd make jokes about the cheap pie and getting lifestyle diseases from the cheap food, but frankly that's a great place for a datacenter. The cost of living there is very nice and it's just hours' drive away from Columbus. I mean there is akron, but that place is a dump. That's a very good place for a datacenter. You have a good talent pool from the state university nearby, and you are an hour away from one of the tech hubs in the state; so they have talent near by. If you want quiet then that would be a great gig.
The only issue might be infrastructure, but 5g broadband seems to be cheaper to implement than fiber.
As for the environmental impact, that's Ohio. The state that was so polluted they had a river catch fire, for a week, which forced "ultra liberal, ultra progressive" Richard Nixion to create the EPA.
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