I’d have to run a few calcs but I’m fairly sure that the damage done by warming the ocean directly versus normal AC-induced carbon production is quite compellingly small.

AFAIK this method is used in Toronto to cool some of the large buildings near the lakeshore (lake Ontario).

Whether you run AC and bleed all the excess heat into the air or run a closed loop system and bleed all the excess heat into the ocean, the long term impact is pretty much indifferent between the two. As was pointed out, particulate pollution is much worse for our health, and greenhouse gas emissions are much, much worse for global warming, and this system by needing less energy to run, would use less electricity than otherwise, thus being better for the environment and our health.

This must use a pump right? How much electricity does that consume to pump the water 2 miles? That electricity is probably generated using coal. There’s your pollution.

@Greg
The diagram clearly states that the system uses 1/10th of traditional A/C. Obviously they took the pump into account when coming up with up that figure, or it wouldn’t make any sense.

-Taylor

10 times the energy efficiency also means 10 times less heat produced.

I lived on an island in the Pacific that did something similar. The cooling produced craploads of condensation as a bonus byproduct, as well as generating small amounts of electricity from the temeperture differential.
It acted with NO additional energy input after it got started, actually generating a slight surplus of power, cooled the buildings, and acted as a bonus desalinization plant for fresh water and irrigation as a side benefit.

Can’t go wrong there, other than you have to have a pretty deep cold ocean trench pretty near to shore, so it only works in a few parts of the world. Continental shelves need not apply.

its called thermal pollution, warming the local waters changes the temp allowing more O2 in the water, this makes some species die and some flourish, it happens all the time around nuclear power plants that cool their reactors with water, its not good for the environment, i’m a Surfer you can trust me, i care about the quality of the ocean i also did a project on this back in high school

@ruster
Whether or not there’s an environmental benefit, it’s hard to argue with a 90% decrease in electricity consumption.

oh i am all on board with this project. thats my point $$$

@Dan
The heated water will be returned at a higher elevation, where the surrounding water is the same temperature. How will it harm the local flora and fauna?

Owen: i’m sorry, your an idiot, to think that man has a larger impact on the environment than the sun is utter stupidity. your ego is too big to fit into hack-a-day.

to everyone else, this is a good idea, they aren’t cooling a nuclear reactor, just a bunch of buildings in the middle of the ocean. there wouldn’t be any noticeable short term or long term effects.

@owen>vern

Tell me if im wrong, the water removed from the lower cooler part of the ocean is removing the heat from the closed loop, then placing the warmed water at an acceptable level. But what happens when you run out of lower cooler water, or remove too much and replace too much slightly warmer water………… it boggles the mind

@T.n and amishx64
The returned water is the same temperature as the water in the ocean at the elevation. Nothing is cooked.

Oh, and T.n, it’s hard to run out of cold water in the Indian ocean.

It is a good idea, and has science, logic, and sound engineering principles behind it.

This is why it will fail.

The environmentalists are famous for fighting at least twice as hard against green ideas than dirty ones. Mainly because they are tools so easily led by FUD, mainly from the big corps they supposedly hate. The corporate guys have to laugh themselves silly at steering all the green dittoheads into cutting thier own throats so often and so easily.

This will encourage red tides.

I like VonSkippy’s idea. Do a heat exchange system and heat up water in homes. Don’t know how practical that is but it’s a good idea.

If one didn’t have abundant fresh water, this could be used to cool the computers and produce quantities of clean water from salt water via evaporation and condensing. That’s assuming there’s enough temperature difference.

It has been said before in these comments, and should be said again.
The warmer water coming away from the datacenter (or any other building) can be used to generate energy, or to reduce the energy consumed for another unrelated purpose.
A good example would be to use this temperature to warm up water used in a steam turbine, thus reducing the energy required to convert water to steam, ergo increasing power output from the turbine. Lots of other uses, like warming water for shower, thus requiring you to heat the water less. etc….

@ Nathan

The basic lack of understanding of the concept, effects or scale, and the incorrect but horrific-sounding nature of the effects when oversimplified to a sound bite, is precisely why technologies like this will not flourish.

Instead we will continue burning coal and fossil fuels, and if an alternative comes up PAC’s and “concerned citizen organizations” backed by those energy companies to the tune of $millions$ make sure the same groundless fears and FUD you just spouted are on everyone’s lips and 30 second TV spots.
Welcome to hell.

i don’t like this.

it seems like another one of those good ideas that is going to be advertised for being green, and that’s why everyone will want it. even if we put it in practice and discover some terrible flaw with it, people will already be petitioning companies to use this method to cool datacenters and other hot spots in the building. there’ll be a huge shitstorm and we’ll still have to keep it up, even though it’ll do more harm than good.

kind of like compact fluorescent bulbs.

It’s more efficient because there are fewer changes of energy types. Heat energy is just moved, producing a little extra friction heat. Air conditioning does that at the added expense of converting it to trees (joke) then heat then mechanical energy then electrical energy then back into mechanical energy (as with an electric air conditioner)… That’s a lot of changes of state… It’s gotta be the better process.

What I don’t understand is the people who still aren’t getting this. It’s a fantastic idea.

@aztraph

“Owen: i’m sorry, your an idiot…”

ah, the perennial classic. Makes my day when I read this line. :-)

Nothing new about this sort of thing. The Sydney Opera House does the same thing with it’s Air Conditioning. Also, the electricity supplier in Christchurch, New Zealand used to use waste heat in the public swimming pool across the road heating the water.

They’ve been using ocean assisted A/C & solar hot water heating in Hawaii for years.

In places like Vegas they do ground loops where you run water/coolant though a closed loop deep enough into the ground where the temperature is about 55F all year. It used to be common to use evaporative cooling (because it’s so dry here) but the Feds take our water now give it to California.

For anybody having trouble understanding please consider the free online MIT lectures. It’s very easy to learn the basics.

http://ocw.mit.edu

Everything in large scale more effective, the problem is large amount of $ for building such system, do you think every resident of building will be OK with paying couple $K instantly even if it will save them 100X more over long run

Since the 1970′s my company has specialised in “Sub-sand sea water abstraction”. We install filters, some up to 70 metres long under sandy beaches and suck! Result, clean filtered sea water, with a massive filter bed, constantly washed by waves and tidal action. Nearly all coastal sea water aquariums and research labs in UK and Ireland use our system. In recent years we have installed these intakes in Greece for exactly this purpose. Cool sea water in for air conditioning. The warmed water goes to the pools and spa and the surplus back to the sea. Win win, and very environmentally friendly.

Compare this with conventional air conditioning which generates heat! No contest.
Richard.

Maybe we could offset the extra energy put into the ocean by warming stuff like houses with AC units that work in reverse. Taking relatively warm surface water chilling it and pumping the cooler water back in at a lower depth (matching the temperature).

This would give us possibly twice as much heat energy as we put in in electricity.

Here in the UK we could do with a better way of warming our houses. My gas bill is draining all my money.

kevin, I’m sorry I had to resort to such a juvenile line, I had a much larger post ready to go when I remembered a few of my own rules, “be quiet” and “keep it simple”. my biggest question to all the global warming types that are commenting on the damage this would do the the ocean is the amount of solar energy that hits the ocean directly, every hour of direct sunlight is worth about a KW of electricity for every 100 sq feet. and they think MAN is warming the ocean when the sun is keeping it from freezing?

James, I’d really like to see some numbers run. Either by you, or the people making this cooling system. I just see the local ecosystem being totally destroyed if this is put to use.
Though, operating costs will be lower, so that’s a plus, right?!
right?

yah, it’s that whole “flourishing life” that I DONT like about this. The local ecosystem is going to change. once scenario is algea growing all over the surface, blocking sunlight to everything underneath. I’m not saying it’ll happen, or that it’s likely.
I’m saying that I want to know the full impact of this project before being in favor or against it

Sayeth the Owen:
“Using gas or coal to power your cooling system puts carbon into the atmosphere, which has a very long-term effect on the world’s temperature.”

that’s man made global warming speak to me, what say you?

@aztraph
The point is that

> Just heating the ocean does nothing to the long-term temperature of the ocean and the world.

and

> Whether or not there’s an environmental benefit, it’s hard to argue with a 90% decrease in electricity consumption.

There /is/ a scientific consensus that the global warming of the last fifty years is attributable to human activity, but that is absolutely irrelevant in the context of this post.

Um, yeah…how could burning fuel to power heatpumps possibly be more efficient than this? This contributes far less to global warming and entropy than any other system.

Just saying ;)

OWEN!
“There /is/ a scientific consensus” is like trident gum saying 10 million teeth can’t be wrong, oh yes they can. a consensus is like saying it’s unanimous, they can all still be wrong but at least they agree about it. and no it isn’t relevant to the article, but it is relevant to YOUR post, I’m arguing with YOU, not the article, it’s a really good idea that shows a lot of thought and ingenuity. being basically a water source heat pump, it can be fine tuned for the application to maximize efficiency. this means less power and less cost in it’s operation, that is always a good idea.

again I apologize for the rant, but to ANYONE who buys into the MAN-MADE global warming MYTH, i have some nice beach front property in Nevada for you to by, bit of a walk to get to the beach but believe me, It’s worth it.

Each time I see someone post about scientists proving global warming is man-made, I go out and burn a few kittens using shredded old tires.

Globar warming scam was made up so government would invest in hydrogen technology scam

With all the talk of heating / cooling the ocean, I’m surprised that nobody has yet mentioned that a 300 baud modem would probably triple the bandwidth in that area of the world, so having this system in place for a data center is sort of a moot point.

hello there, here in Polynesia they do implement this Sea water air conditioning system which made me end up on this post after one night of internet search. From what i know they will go between 600till900m deep to get water around 4-5 degres and drop it at 20 degres around 50m deep where the sea is at same temp… ok I am not a specialist but if you get 300000 L (i have no ideas about the real volume c’se it looks likes they hide it) at 4 degres and you put this volume back but at 20 degres, it cannot be very friendly for the ecosystem no? did anybody heard about methane gas which is very much reactiv to a small raise of ocean temperature, which could be responsible for the bermuda triangle disapearing boats.. For the ones saying it will not affect us, can you please give me the reference where i can find a proper study because they do start to implement this new technology a bit everywhere on the planet, I need your eyes, i have spend one night on this search, apart of a chinese research which have conclude that this is still under study, I do not see anywhere a correct specialist study on the subject but looks like they do not need any autorization and public information to start implement it all around the world… Isabelle

*tests

Given the size of the ocean, it’s more like taking a microscopic drop of water from the cup, heating it, and putting it back in. I don’t see the problem.