Multiple Speakers Discuss Water Issues at Google’s Efficiency Data Center Summit

I have been blogging about water issues in the data center for a while, and have a category for tagging posts for “water.”

It was good to see so many speakers bring up water as the next big issue, not because of cost, but due to supply issues.  As Ken Brill presented the view Green is overhyped and money is the issue for driving data center.  The cost of water will not drive some of the methods Google used to reduce its water use as water is artificially price constrained in many areas.  But, when you do a risk analysis of the water supply, you quickly realize the probability of a water shortage shutting your data center down is something you need to address.

Andrew Fanara started off bringing up water issues as the next big issue in data centers.

James Hamilton presented water use numbers for cooling systems.

In the Best Practices Q&A with Ken Brill, James Hamilton, Olivier Sanche, and Bill Tschudi, water came up again.

Then Google’s green guy Bill Weihl and Joe Kava presented water issues Google has looked at for data centers.

Here are a few slides from Joe’s presentation.  Joe specifically brought up the issue James’s numbers were too low, because the amount of water used by power generation is higher than the amount of water used by cooling systems.

 

Then there was a video on how Google’s data center is getting water from the below canal.

Comments

[David Ibarra]

The water item is critical, Joe C from Google was correct on the overall consumption, the way you assemble the number.



* Direct Water consumption:

Basically how many gallons of water I need for my cooling plant and relate it to the power required for treatment and distribution (water treatment/pumping,etc)

* Indirect water burden that comes with the energy consumption by the cooling infrastructure of the DC plus the energy consumption by the IT component of the DC both in kW. Then you relate this estimating how many gallons of water does the local power plant use to generate the total kW you need per day/year.

If you relate both of those you can create a site Water PUE.

Even tough Google stated that water is cheap , you need to look at it from the strategic aspect of the business: water is limited, companies are buying rights, economy condition will make a lot states to start privatizing the water supply industry.Just these factors should motivate us to improve how use of water no matter how small our DC is.