this post was submitted on 10 May 2026
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I keep seeing this on Lemmy, but why do so many people think that these datacenters are using water from reservoirs for "cooling"?
Datacenters use A/C for cooling, and if there's any sort of "Liquid cooling" being used on these servers, it's in a closed loop system.
Water isn't being pumped out as steam or into the environment directly from datacenters, unless there's some other method I'm missing here?
What I think is getting mixed up here is that, for many forms of generating electricity, water is needed to be heated up in some way to create steam. The steam then turns a turbine which moves some magnets to generate electricity.
Some of those powerplants are in closed loop systems with their water, some of them are not. Additionally, if the energy is coming from solar/wind/hydro then there shouldn't be any concerns about water getting turned into steam anyway.
No. All steam turbine plants have an evaporation stage in their cycle. They might have part of the loop be closed, but there's always some part of the thermal loop that's open.
I mean when you heat up a lake, it starts evaporating faster. Also some have switched to using evaporative cooling instead of AC. That's why they're building them in deserts. You can save a lot of energy, but need to waste water. In the desert that might piss off people living nearby.
But yes, the power plant water use is actually bigger than direct use. If it's a lossy thermal plant.
Thanks, looks like I was wrong. I looked into the evaporative cooling. It looks like this kicks in if it's hot outside, otherwise the cooling units operate in a "dry" mode.
Although, none of that is directly heating up a lake, it looks like the water just flows into something like an A/C unit. Are there datacenters that are piping heat directly into lakes?
Yes, Equinix is one company building them. Of course they'll tell you that this results in zero water loss, but it can't be good for the long term health of the lake to use it as a heatsink.
In cold climates with distance heating, though, it's possible to make efficient use of the heated water in the cold months by using it for residential heating. Not very useful in the summer though.
This is the reason. Deserts are hotter, but also dryer, so it makes evaporative chillers ridiculously efficient. That's how and why they build datacenters out here. Go look at any DC facility in the state and you'll see evapco equipment being used.