A Shortage of Drinking Water and Electricity in Ireland

Eh. No.

I'm saying that if its possible to suitable filter rainwater for carwashes it should be possible to do it for cooling water. But that there won't be any rainwater during a hot summer shortage anyway.

Explained here

irish context.

they can use as much as 500 tons of water a day.

O

The same strategy also states:

"Data centres can provide benefits to the electricity system due to their typically consistent, as opposed to ‘peaky’ demand profile which can provide system support at night. In addition, data centres are a potential provider of system services and demand response which is beneficial to Ireland’s energy system."

[...]

"For example, it is the case that large energy users such as data centres contribute to network charges and the PSO levy, and that increasing levels of renewables place downward pressure on wholesale prices thereby potentially mitigating the impact of PSO cost increases."

[...]

"Furthermore, data centres desire for ‘green’ electricity supply could stimulate supply and technology innovation in the renewable energy sector that attracts investment in Ireland and increases the pace of transition to low carbon technologies."

As to why our costs are so high:

• we shut over a sixth of our peak consumption in generation capacity and did nothing to replace it
• We left ourselves solely reliant on gas as the primary generator fuel source
• we refused to build infrastructure such as LNG to allow diversifying source of supply
• we pay renewable generators the gas equivalent cost per kWh, hence why we had zero insulation against the volatile gas prices as of late
• We know we will lose another 1.5GW of generation capacity by 2025 yet have done sweet feck all to prepare alternatives.

And now we want to move transport and heating exclusively to electricity and our grid has no capability to cope. But it is far easier to blame the datacentre operators for using up so much power than actually do anything to solve the issues facing us in the near future...

The main service provided by data centres is to the world, not specifically to the Irish economy, like motorways do. So, their benefit to us in the long run, is employment, and that is quite limited, as compared with other operations by multi-nationals. The water consumption issue was news to me. From what I can see, that kind of evaporative cooling was originally designed for hot climates where closed-circuit air conditioning is much less efficient. It could be still the case that it's cheaper here too, but why then aren't all cooling systems in this country, that type, as opposed to purely electrically powered closed-loop systems?

Yes, but same point as above. They provide an essential service to the economy as a whole

Yes, I accept that point. System services are useful. I'm guessing they can act as DSUs in the grid which is a benefit, but it's only a secondary benefit as compared with the primary concern of long term electricity consumption and the effect that has on our CO2 output. I'm not arguing against data centres per-se. But, I think we need to look very hard at where they are located in future.

Our climate is primarily why it's chosen - it's never extremely hot or extremely cold for extended periods of time, we don't suffer from extremely dry or extremely humid outside air, we're not on a fault line, we don't suffer major storms, tornados, floods, lightning, etc. and it makes it perfect for evaporative cooling as opposed to air conditioning:

Evaporative cooling works on the basis that if you draw warm air over water, the water will evaporate and this consumes a significant amount of the heat energy present within the air to do so. The end result is that you end up with cooler air that now has a higher humidity level than before.

You'll often see units in large shops during the summer that are blowing air that feels much colder compared to the air within the space around it but that aren't vented or piped anywhere so has no way of actually removing heat from the area it's "cooling" - that's an evaporative cooler:

Typically it's a sponge like material which is kept dipped in water so it is constantly absorbing. Air is then drawn through the wet sponge - in the case of a datacentre, outside air. As the air is drawn through, it causes water within the sponge to evaporate and the evaporation process removes heat as it does so. The sponge then absords more water from the tank it sits in and and the process continues.

That cooler, but also more humid, air is then blown through the ventiliation system of the datacentre where it is warmed back up again from the equipment present. That air gets extracted back outside into the atmosphere again containing the heat absorbed from cooling the equipment along with the water that was used to cool the air it as it was originally drawn in.

The only electricity used in the whole process is what is used to power the blowers to move the air around.

This is compared to a full air conditioning system which requires powerful heat pumps to move refrigerant around in a closed loop process. As it happens, though, cooling air using air conditioning naturally dehumidifies it as well, so you still end up using water even with a closed loop air conditioning system, albeit nowhere near as much water as with evaporative cooling.

Evaporative cooling works well here because our air is not too hot nor is it too humid - somewhere like Texas, for example, the amount of water you need to evaporate to effectively cool the air will make the air so humid as to be unsuitable for use in a datacentre environment.

100% agree on location. There's no need for them to be all clustered around Dublin and a recent consultation by the CRU alluded to that too:

Datacentres should be located close to where the generation occurs. It's been mostly Dublin up to now as that's where most of global connectivity lands and because the bulk of our island's generating capacity is centered around Dublin. That's why Apple were trying to locate theirs in Athenry, so it would be much closer to the source of wind generation along the west coast.

Directly, they don't employ many - but indirectly, Microsoft, Google and Facebook all have significant numbers of staff here, on high wages (high tax revenue), there are Irish companies who are being called upon all over the world to bulid datacentres based on the experience they've built up here, it's driving necessary investment into our electrical grid and broadband infrastructure (only it's the cart trying to drive the horses).

Surprised nobody has posted about the datacentre outages in London recently:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-19/google-oracle-data-centers-knocked-offline-by-london-heat

So if there’s a shortage of gas there’s a shortage of electricity.

If there’s a shortage of electricity there’s a shortage of water.

Let me know when you're ready to explore the reality of why data centre capacity is so cheap.

I’d rather we didn’t upload billions of photos and videos that we’re never going to look at again to cloud services that are filling up data centres that are a very significant user of limited energy and water resources.

Perhaps you’ve forgotten, but we had a couple of years of uproar a few years back over the “water comes from the sky” story.

But yeah, you get those nukes sorted, and then we can pi$$ away our energy supplies storing sh1te that we’re never going to use.

Relatively speaking? Relative to what? Photos and videos are wasting vast amounts of data centres storage, because 99.9% of them will never be touched or used again. They’re going up to the cloud because we can’t be arsed decided which 1 or 2 of the 100 photos we take on a night out are actually worth keeping.

But if you want to get the infrastructural issues with water management that have challenged our country for decades sorted first, then I’ll stop moaning about storage.