>This idea of constant fresh water being used doesn’t make much sense to me.
They're taking advantage of inappropriately priced industrial water.
Regardless of if it makes sense, that's what they're doing. Using a lot of cold groundwater and then dumping it.
It would be much more expensive to have a closed loop of cooling water (and you're not going to get a lot of cooling on a humid 90 degree Iowa summer day)
Seems like northern Canada would be a good spot. Plenty of water and cold, and not many people to object to living next door. For most of the year they could just run the pipes outside to cool them down.
Averages in a place like Nunavut are below freezing 8 months of the year. Averages in Michigan are only below freezing 1 month of the year (according to wherever Apple Weather pulls their weather averages)
The population in Nunavut is 40,000 vs 10M in Michigan, despite Nunavut being 21x larger than Michigan. That ends up being 0.05/sq mi in Nunavut vs 174/sq mi in Michigan.
Northern Canada is much colder, has more fresh water, and has drastically lower population density, which should make it easier to find an area where people won't complain (other than environmentalists), and they would be able to better leverage nature for most of the year to help with cooling costs.
They're taking advantage of inappropriately priced industrial water.
Regardless of if it makes sense, that's what they're doing. Using a lot of cold groundwater and then dumping it.
It would be much more expensive to have a closed loop of cooling water (and you're not going to get a lot of cooling on a humid 90 degree Iowa summer day)