cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/53694832
The boom is set to produce enough greenhouse gases to cancel out 15 years of declines in power-sector emissions, according to a Sierra Club analysis.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/53694832
The boom is set to produce enough greenhouse gases to cancel out 15 years of declines in power-sector emissions, according to a Sierra Club analysis.
This is my second followup reply to the same circumstances described:
Lake Boehmer is a roughly 60-acre body of water in west Texas that sprouted from a former oil well that’s been allowed to leak since 1951. It produces 642 gallons of toxic salt and sulfured water a minute. It is undrinkable and simply spilling out on the ground. A 100MW datacenter consumes 367 gallons per minute, so not quite half of what is coming out of the ground every minute. Additionally the existing 60 acre lake can also be drawn from to increase the water consumption. There are also almost no one living out there meaning it would not impact the quality of life of residents.
West Texas is also the home of some of the largest wind farms in the USA producing 11.431GW of electricty. Wind, unlike solar, also has 24/7 generation, which more fits the model of a data center for power consumption. Solar could also be installed to supplement during daylight ours of course.
There is also lots of unused land out there. There are a number of datacenters already going up in west Texas so the know-how to build them already exists locally too.
Water that salty is corrosive. You can’t just use it for datacenter cooling (or running a power plant) without removing the salt at considerable cost. It’s cheaper to bribe politicians to transfer fresh water into their use than it is to desalinate that and use it.
Using traditional systems designed for fresh water sure, but there are methods to using high saline water already. Here’s the science . It also likely won’t surprise you to learn that the nations in the Middle East already has high saline evaporation cooling deployed in industrial applications for years now.