[efsavage]

The water argument rings a bit hollow for me not due to whataboutism but more that there's an assumption that I know what "using" water means, which I am not sure I do. I suspect many people have even less of an idea than I do so we're all kind of guessing and therefore going to guess in ways favorable to our initial position whatever that is.

Perhaps this is the point, maybe the political math is that more people than not will assume that using water means it's not available for others, or somehow destroyed, or polluted, or whatever. AFAIK they use it for cooling so it's basically thermal pollution which TBH doesn't trigger me the same way that chemical pollution would. I don't want 80c water sterilizing my local ecosystem, but I would guess that warmer, untreated water could still be used for farming and irrigation. Maybe I'm wrong, so if the water angle is a bigger deal than it seems then some education is in order.

[leoedin]

If water is just used for cooling, and the output is hotter water, then it's not really "used" at all. Maybe it needs to be cooled to ambient and filtered before someone can use it, but it's still there.

If it was being used for evaporative cooling then the argument would be stronger. But I don't think it is - not least because most data centres don't have massive evaporative cooling towers.

Even then, whether we consider it a bad thing or not depends on the location. If the data centre was located in an area with lots of water, it's not some great loss that it's being evaporated. If it's located in a desert then it obviously is.

[HPsquared]

If it was evaporative, the amounts would be much less.

[Blackcatmaxy]

Imnot sure why you're saying it would be less? All sources I can find say that evaporative cooling is a tradeoff of more water for less power.

[HPsquared]

Just from a physics standpoint.

If you discharge water into a river, there are environmental limits to the outlet temperature (this is a good thing btw). The water can't be very hot. That means you need to pump a large volume of water through because you can only put a small amount of energy into each kg of water.

If you evaporate the water on the other hand, not only is there no temperature limit but it also absorbs the latent heat of vaporisation. The downside is it's a lot more complex and also the water is truly consumed rather than just warming it up.

[HPsquared]

Put that way, any electricity usage will have some "water usage" as power plants turn up their output (and the cooling pumps) slightly. And that's not even mentioning hydroelectric plants!