I guess it's possible to have a condensing station, but generally speaking you'd need to supply input energy to allow it to cool down and condense somehow. The bigger question here is if a datacenter using evaporative cooling where does the moisture go? If it just feeds a cloud system that rains on nearby fields, it's not much different than irrigating crops. If it feeds clouds that go offshore and rain into the ocean, it's similar to just diverting drinking water into the ocean
I must be missing something, why can't it be entirely closed loop like a water radiator in an old car? A simple fan running through large radiator cores would certainly condense within the system, keeping the water in the system
A closed loop system has a COP of 4, adding in cooling towers almost doubles that to 7. You can reject 1.75x more heat for the same amount of electricity by adding evaporative cooling towers.
> I was under the impression they capture the evaporation, let it cool, and recycle it?
So, how do they get rid of the latent heat of evaporation that's released when the water recondenses?
The whole point of evaporative cooling is to soak up that latent heat and release it later, out in the environment, when the water recondenses somewhere else.
It's kind of like why Dune's stillsuits don't work.
I guess it's possible to have a condensing station, but generally speaking you'd need to supply input energy to allow it to cool down and condense somehow. The bigger question here is if a datacenter using evaporative cooling where does the moisture go? If it just feeds a cloud system that rains on nearby fields, it's not much different than irrigating crops. If it feeds clouds that go offshore and rain into the ocean, it's similar to just diverting drinking water into the ocean
I must be missing something, why can't it be entirely closed loop like a water radiator in an old car? A simple fan running through large radiator cores would certainly condense within the system, keeping the water in the system
A closed loop system has a COP of 4, adding in cooling towers almost doubles that to 7. You can reject 1.75x more heat for the same amount of electricity by adding evaporative cooling towers.
COP is coefficient of performance.
> I was under the impression they capture the evaporation, let it cool, and recycle it?
So, how do they get rid of the latent heat of evaporation that's released when the water recondenses?
The whole point of evaporative cooling is to soak up that latent heat and release it later, out in the environment, when the water recondenses somewhere else.
It's kind of like why Dune's stillsuits don't work.
A 1 GW heat source evaporates about 9 million gallons per day.
In 2024, US data centers consumed power at an average rate of about 21 GW.
So, that would be about 70 billion gallons per year evaporated.