Trolley 586

The two trolleys comprising trolley 586 were captured in the Kokoro Passage this morning, two large trolleys from Waitrose (for a change), one from each side of the railing in the snap above. Litter removed and returned to the stack at the entrance to the store.

In due course, home to take a look at the Financial Times, where my eye was caught by a piece (reference 2) about how water rich Europe is heading for trouble in the water department. How on earth are they going to manage in places which have much less of the stuff than we do?

Along the way, there was a picture of a Google data centre in Saint-Ghislain in Belgium, said to consume more than 250m gallons of cooling water a year, water which is taken from a nearby industrial canal. Gray water in the jargon of water people.

So where does all this water go? Is the data centre cooled by evaporating all this water up into the sky? First off, I turn up reference 3, which tells me that this data centre has all the latest, most environmentally friendly technology going, technology which bears down on both the consumption of electricity and that of water. With data centres generally having something of a bad name for the amount of electricity they get through. But I don't learn what happens to all the water.

So second off, I try Bard, with a short series of questions: 

What does the St. Ghislain data centre do with all the water that it uses?

What does used mean? Does it all end up in the sky or does it get put back into the canal?

Why can you not keep recycling the water through the closed-loop for ever?

Where can I read more about closed-loop systems of this sort?

The answers to first three were quite helpful, if a little repetitive. Bard seems to know quite a lot about it all, prompting one to wonder whether it has been especially groomed to deal with questions which bear on Google's corporate image. In any event, I did not feel I needed to check. And the story seemed to be that while the water was recycled through the cooling system several times, some evaporated, some was lost and what was left accumulated bad stuff. Net result, the system was consuming water. It was also putting lots of it back, albeit in a tainted condition. But when I wanted more, Bard gave up, giving me its standard line when it runs out of puff about only being a language model and not being competent to deal with questions of this sort.

So I don't really know what is going on here. But it does look as if Google are doing better than simply trading electricity consumption (on air conditioning) for water consumption.

PS 1: a fairly monster site, making the data centres which I used to visit occasionally look pretty puny. The canal in question runs across the top of the snap. Didn't spot any electricity pylons or a sub-station though.

PS 2: Bard had no trouble working out that St. Ghislain was the same as Saint-Ghislain. A Belgian saint from the middle of the first millennium. They appear to know a great deal about him at reference 4 - while Bard contents himself with an abridged version which he says comes from Wikipedia. So he does know something about sources.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/08/trolley-585.html.

Reference 2: Europe’s water crisis: how supplies turned to ‘gold dust’: Drought, leaky pipes and poor policy among several factors contributing to continent’s scarcity problem - Alice Hancock, Camilla Hodgson, Alan Smith, Financial Times - 2023.

Reference 3: https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/locations/st-ghislain/.

Reference 4: https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06547a.htm.

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