- hydrology
- data-center
- water-balance
Consumptive cooling is the share of a facility's cooling-water withdrawal that does not return to the watercourse — primarily evaporative loss from cooling towers. Unlike a once-through return, a consumptive draw permanently removes flow from the system downstream of the intake.
For a hyperscale data center, the consumptive fraction of the cooling demand is the quantity that matters to the river: it is subtracted from live flow in the assimilative capacity screen against the 7Q10. The water-balance model treats the cooling demand and its consumptive fraction as scenario inputs (labelled assumptions), while the receiving-water flows are read from live gauges and the permit record.
Whether the rejected heat is dumped or recovered is a separate design axis — see heat reuse — that can shift the consumptive fraction where recovery displaces evaporative rejection.