[pjdesno]

It's near Springfield, Massachusetts.

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)