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A comment on Intel breaks ground on $20B Arizona plants as U.S. chip factory race heats up. Parent comment

Re:Intel breaks ground on $20B Arizona plants as U.S. chip f... by amluto on Wednesday September 29, 2021 @01:02AM (#28690461)
Assuming that those 600kgal start out ice cold and all end up evaporated at the boiling point, that’s 146MW of cooling. LCoE for plain solar power is about $31/MWh. Assuming you could discharge heat without evaporation at a COP of 4, that’s about $26k/day to buy power. Not at all cheap, but not insane. Interestingly, that is a lot more than the cost to buy that much water wholesale, even in Arizona, so I guess this is why people like cooling towers.
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Re:Intel breaks ground on $20B Arizona plants as U.S. chip f... by j_walter on Wednesday September 29, 2021 @12:02PM (#28695539)
600k gallons for us is not all evaporated, thats just what we take in from the city and discharge back to them. There are temperature requirements for discharge as well so you can't just discharge 200 degree water. That doesn't really work anyway since our process cooling water has to stay at ~70 degrees.

We have some evaporation loss, but in the Phoenix climate it would be a lot more.

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