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Comment by paulitex | Hacker News Reader

Was anyone able to glean Google's plans for the huge volumes of heated sea water 'waste'? I sure hope they're not planning on just pumping it back into the Baltic - warming of the world's oceans and seas is a very serious problem (see http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/07/temperature-ocean-... for a summary).

It seems this only shifts their heat dissipation problem from having to cool servers to having to cool large quantities of sea water. Perhaps the latter is an easier problem to solve (gigantic outdoor cooling tubs?) but I don't know.

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This would have to be one hell of a data center to have an appreciable effect on the temperature of the Baltic Sea.

> I sure hope they're not planning on just pumping it back into the Baltic

Of course they are. Direct ocean cooling is common for power plants much larger than a data center, and the effect on water temperatures overall is trivial.

For some perspective. This data center may produce 10^7-10^8 watts of heat. A power plant may produce 10^9-10^10 W. The solar heating of the Baltic sea is 3x10^13 W. (337,000 km^2 x 100 W/m^2)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Insolation.png

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Sea

Many power plants heat sea water (either for steam or cooling), I think the ocean can handle a data center just fine.

Update: I should add that I'm all for environmental study to make sure that they aren't venting it out in a sensitive ecosystem or at a radically different temp. Done correctly this can be an important development towards sustainable data centers.

We're talking about the baltic sea here. Its average depth is 55m.

Besides, it's already quite contaminated so there is a lot of environmental protection going around it.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/BalticSea...

As you can see, there really isn't places for the water to flow back and forth, so it's not a case of "the ocean is going to handle it"

Always consider the context.

Yes, but it's still a massive body of water. Local heating of the water may be an environmental issue (although a small one, I think), but heating of the entire Baltic Sea is absolutely negligible.

It's definitely important to do a measured environmental review when installing a large infrastructure.

However, the world as it stands now is going to have data centers, and these take energy. Direct environmental cooling undoubtedly has less of an impact than producing energy, powering a compressor, and using that to cool circulated air. Think of the relative number energy conversions (0 vs 2+).

In the video linked from the article, they mention that they are going to pump the outgoing water around the complex back to the sea and it will be nearly the same temperate as the sea water when it reaches back. I imagine they are going to use the cold air of the climate to reduce the heat.

>I imagine they are going to use the cold air of the climate to reduce the heat.

No, they are discharging heat into the sea. Their outlet water is "nearly the same temperature" because the amount of water involved is immense (the article says the seawater intake is 2 meters wide). A large amount of heat, divided over a very large water flow, is diluted into a small temperature increase.

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