this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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Technology
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Everything has to be cooled, it's a question of efficiency. Directly exchanging the heat into cold water is arguably better than expending fossil fuels to generate electricity to pump the heat out of your servers and into the atmosphere. You get multiple losses with current technology: fossil fuel efficiency losses, electric line losses, air conditioning efficiency losses. And the additional electrical generation dumps more CO2.
Oh no doubt. It makes a great deal of sense.
I'm just curious what the actual heat output is (avg, min, max, in vs out), and what the environmental impact is.
Will there be biofouling because the warm seawater is desirable?
Will it even be viable offshore from places like Miami?
Can it produce too much heat for the local environment? Probably not one, but what about after this scale-up with renewables like the article mentions?
At what scale would it begin to disrupt things like the AMOC?