We want your pee to cool these data centers.” Then, as a crowd of people walk through a field sipping their branded beverages, they sing in unison: “Let’s pee on computers together to save humanity!” It’s a funny commercial. What’s even funnier is that Kelce has unwittingly stumbled upon a real tactic for cooling down data centers. One such alternative water source is recycled water, which is made by treating wastewater and sewage water so that they’re safe to use again.
Wastewater and sewage water contain many things, including — you guessed it! — human urine. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), told TechCrunch. To be clear: you should not actually contribute gallons of your pee to help cool data centers, as Kelce facetiously suggests.
But just for the sake of the thought experiment: what would happen if you did try to cool a data center with a steady stream of pee? It contains salts, it contains urea, bacteria, organic matter of all sorts that can leave mineral deposits. If you just put that into a cooling tower or something else, it would require constant cleaning,” said Pigott.
Can you imagine if you just poured urine through hot air?” We do have the technology to turn our urine into potable drinking water — that’s what astronauts do in space, since they can only bring so much water with them on their spacecraft. But that isn’t efficient at a large scale, and even if it were, it’s not like scientists can just access millions of gallons of pee at will (well, not unless Kelce really commits to the bit). Instead, our toilet water ends up in wastewater and sewage.
That’s where water treatment facilities come in, providing recycled water to spare us from the smell of evaporated urine. These facilities use membrane bioreactors, reverse osmosis, ultraviolet light, and other processes to treat water until it’s clean enough for industrial use. In some cases, this water can even be treated to the point that it’s drinkable.
Greta Zornes, practice leader for water reuse at the engineering firm CDM Smith, told TechCrunch. When data centers use more recycled water, they don’t pose as much of a burden to the local potable water supply. But industries can only pivot to recycled water use when there is proper infrastructure in place to treat millions of gallons of water every day.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
