My point is not that evaporative cooling is necessary - it's that it's efficient, and therefore common. I found some 10-year-old info from our datacenter, and it looks like mid-summer months add an extra 20% in power consumption for cooling, in large part due to running the chillers, which are industrial-scale active A/C units to raise the exhaust heat temperature. Average outdoor temp (24-hr average) during those months was 70-75F.
It's a pretty small datacenter, so getting rid of the evaporative cooler would probably "only" cost us a couple of megawatts or so in additional power consumption. (and maybe 15 million pounds of carbon emissions - our power is hydro, but electricity is fungible, so every kWh we use probably results in an additional kWh of fossil fuel generation somewhere in the grid)
My point is not that evaporative cooling is necessary - it's that it's efficient, and therefore common. I found some 10-year-old info from our datacenter, and it looks like mid-summer months add an extra 20% in power consumption for cooling, in large part due to running the chillers, which are industrial-scale active A/C units to raise the exhaust heat temperature. Average outdoor temp (24-hr average) during those months was 70-75F.
It's a pretty small datacenter, so getting rid of the evaporative cooler would probably "only" cost us a couple of megawatts or so in additional power consumption. (and maybe 15 million pounds of carbon emissions - our power is hydro, but electricity is fungible, so every kWh we use probably results in an additional kWh of fossil fuel generation somewhere in the grid)