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by yreg 1 day ago
Why can't they condense the vapor on site? Or simply use closed cooling loops? Would it be that much more expensive?
1 comments

The premise of evaporative cooling is that the phase change absorbs an enormous amount of heat and carries it away. The heat is returned when it condenses back into water, so doing it on-site would defeat the purpose.

Hypothetically you could recondense it somewhere else, i.e. get a large land area and then capture the rainfall. Probably the big win there would be to take the water which is currently routed into the ocean from storm drains and recover it instead of doing that with it.