Cooling obtained by evaporating water into the incoming air, cheap in electricity but whose efficiency collapses precisely when the air is hot and humid.
Adiabatic cooling lowers the temperature of incoming air by evaporating water into it, a low-electricity technique that has driven down the energy efficiency metrics of data centers built over the past fifteen years. Its performance depends on the wet-bulb temperature of outside air rather than dry-bulb alone, so it collapses exactly when it would be most needed, during an episode that is both hot and humid. The technique therefore trades a dependence on electricity for a dependence on water, which becomes an operating constraint wherever the resource is contested and a local acceptance issue measured by the water usage metric. For insurance this is a case where the climate peril destroys nothing: it pushes the installation past a design limit, with servers shutting down on thermal protection before any physical damage occurs. The consequence is that the loss takes the form of business interruption without prior damage, a configuration many property wordings do not trigger and which therefore needs a dedicated clause.
On 19 July 2022, during the heat episode in which the United Kingdom exceeded forty degrees for the first time, cooling failures took equipment out of service in London data centers operated by Google Cloud and Oracle, leaving customer services unavailable.
adiabatic cooling, refroidissement évaporatif, evaporative cooling