Water Power
The topic of water or liquid cooling for data centers keeps coming up.
Just when it seems that every old mainframe data center has had all of the water pipes removed, the wisdom of water over air cooling has seen a resurgence. 
Actually there isn't any disagreement that water/liquid is a more effective cooling agent than air. It's just that all of that liquid flowing through pipes next to all of that expensive electronic gear made operators nervous.
So, as soon as they could, most had it removed.
Times have changed.
Again.
Re-enter liquid cooling - maybe. ( See Adam Trujillo's interview with Neil Rasmussen of APC. )
So, I started looking at the relationship of water and energy.
But I was sidetracked. I followed some interesting info bits that seem obvious now but which had never occurred to me.
Water uses lots of energy - lots more than the oil that heats my son's never-ending showers.
Think about it and it is obvious. Just never thought about it.
The California Energy Commission has.
"Water use in California consumes significant amounts of electrical energy. Preliminary estimates indicate that total energy used to pump and treat this water exceeds 15,000 GWh per year, or at least 6.5 percent of the total electricity used in the State per year. This energy use is expected to increase due to a growing population, increasing reuse of wastewater, the remoteness or lower quality of alternative water sources, and increasingly stringent treatment requirements due to a variety of water quality and environmental protection concerns."
Turns out that there are several reasons for this, some peculiar to California geography and agriculture, but the essentials are mostly universal.
If you stand by a stream and want a drink, that's easy. Reach in and take a cup - as long as its clean.
But mostly the water is pumped - from reservoirs, wells, desalination plants, water treatment plants etc.
Most must be treated.
More energy.
Some must be heavily filtered, chemically treated, dispersed through an aquifer then reclaimed. Then pumped over distance.
More energy.
Now, get it to my house and burn more energy for the teenager's showers - some that include singing and dramatic re-enactments.
Entertaining perhaps but still more energy.
That's what I pay for directly in energy, the oil for home hot water. That's all I ever really thought about, until now.
( I found a potential answer to the extended teen showers. It's an auto-timer called "The Shower Manager" . Desperate times ...)
But in the long term that may be the least of our worries. First we need enough clean water. Then we need energy to move it. Finally, we need energy for heating and cooling and ultimate treatment / reuse.
Some corporations have taken direct actions of their own. For example, EMC built a water treatment plant behind corporate headquarters. More than 3 million gallons a year are treated and reused for building cooling systems or put back into the Charles River aquifer.
The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates that utilities in the US account for "...3% of national energy consumption, equivalent to approximately 56 billion kilowatt hours (kWh), ... for drinking water and wastewater services."
That's twice what data centers use for energy.
The EPA has developed energy objectives for this too and the potential savings are substantial:
"If one out of every 100 American homes retrofitted with water-efficient fixtures, we could save about 100 million kWh of electricity per year and avoid adding 80,000 tons of greenhouse gas to the atmosphere. EPA’s WaterSense program is helping to identify water efficient products that will help reduce energy needs to treat and deliver drinking water and wastewater."
And I can't leave the EPA without a mention of Benjamin Grumbles.
(Is that a great name or what? How can his co-workers resist the obvious puns? How could this not be a name for a Dickens character? What does he sound like when he testifies before Congress? Serious; no doubt.)
Mr. Grumbles, an assistant administrator at the EPA, writes that "Reducing climate impacts, saving money, and saving water" are objectives of the EPA "Watersense" program. Some good ideas here, and they'll help you connect the dots on water and energy.
One more diversion. This one was a front page story a few days ago in the Boston Globe. The article makes the point that many upscale restaurants in the Boston area are "beginning to climb aboard the no-bottled-water bandwagon rolling in from California". So, you may hear a waitress in Harvard Square ask: "Can I offer you a glass of Cambridge filtered?’’
A few points struck me in particular.
First, a change in attitude:
"Until recently, you probably wouldn’t even have heard the words ‘‘tap water’’ in a Boston restaurant..."
Second, a willingness to take personal action:
"Mike Kossa-Rienzi, general manager at Chez Panisse, ‘‘We went through 25,000 bottles a year, so think about the waste. The city recycles, but that’s a lot of glass. Not only that, there’s the impact of shipping all that water. We got ours from Italy. It was being bottled in Italy, trucked to a port, shipped around the world, then trucked to our restaurant.’’
Third, this is bigger than most of us imagined:
"...in 2006 Americans bought 31.2 billion liters of bottled water" and that "bottling water produced more than 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide"
Finally, that people are indeed connecting the dots:
"In fact, 80 Boston restaurants are participating in a UNICEF initiative in which restaurants ask their guests to contribute $1 or more for their glasses of tap water. Funds for the program,... go to providing children with safe drinking water." This was in support of World Water Day.
Water. Energy. The environment.
People are thinking about them differently.
Just like energy in data centers.
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