As California enters the third year of one of the worst droughts in the past 100 years, organizations are looking for creative ways to not only decrease their water usage, but also to provide new sources of fresh water.
California-based DeepWater Desal is proposing a unique way to aid the state, 82 percent of which is currently classified as in extreme or exceptional drought, through a recent innovation in its desalination process.
Desalination is the process of converting ocean water into potable water. Because of the large amount of energy needed for the reverse osmosis process, it has been underutilized. However, Deepwater Desal recently proposed that by joining its technology to a data center near Monterey Bay, it can not only improve data center cooling efficiency, but produce more than 8.1 billion gallons of potable water per year, according to a report in Tech Republic.
Monterey Bay is located near a submarine canyon that exists close to the shore, providing the perfect water input that would create minimal disturbance to marine life. However, at the depths of the canyon, the water is too cold to undergo the reverse osmosis process.
By using the water first for data center cooling, the water would then be at an appropriate temperature to be turned into drinkable water that could help combat the state's current water crisis.
"If the water is first run through the data center cooling heat exchanger, at very little increased pumping losses, the data center now gets cooled for essentially free (just the costs of circulating their cooling plant). And, as an additional upside, the desalination plant gets warmer feed water which can reduce pumping losses by millions of dollars annually. A pretty nice solution," James Hamilton, Vice President at Amazon Web Services, wrote in a recent blog post.
Such innovative thinking could soon impact data center infrastructure management, as managers seek to balance data center efficiency with environmental impact.
