[colechristensen]

They still sometimes use water from limited resources or add a nontrivial amount of heat to a natural body of water or river. They also often pull it out of aquifers. The largest data center I can find is in Iowa and uses over a billion gallons of water a year, equivalent to tens of thousands of homes.

Now Iowa probably has more water than almost anywhere, but still. Protesting the usage is valid.

[al_borland]

Wouldn’t a water treatment plant solve this, so water can be reused and they aren’t pumping it out of the ground, using it for cooling briefly, then dumping it? This idea of constant fresh water being used doesn’t make much sense to me.

[colechristensen]

>This idea of constant fresh water being used doesn’t make much sense to me.

They're taking advantage of inappropriately priced industrial water.

Regardless of if it makes sense, that's what they're doing. Using a lot of cold groundwater and then dumping it.

It would be much more expensive to have a closed loop of cooling water (and you're not going to get a lot of cooling on a humid 90 degree Iowa summer day)

[al_borland]

Seems like northern Canada would be a good spot. Plenty of water and cold, and not many people to object to living next door. For most of the year they could just run the pipes outside to cool them down.

[bryan_w]

>Plenty of water and cold,

People say the same thing about Michigan, yet, here we are

[al_borland]

Averages in a place like Nunavut are below freezing 8 months of the year. Averages in Michigan are only below freezing 1 month of the year (according to wherever Apple Weather pulls their weather averages)

The population in Nunavut is 40,000 vs 10M in Michigan, despite Nunavut being 21x larger than Michigan. That ends up being 0.05/sq mi in Nunavut vs 174/sq mi in Michigan.

Northern Canada is much colder, has more fresh water, and has drastically lower population density, which should make it easier to find an area where people won't complain (other than environmentalists), and they would be able to better leverage nature for most of the year to help with cooling costs.

[colechristensen]

There aren't any roads to Nunavut, much less fat fiber pipes and gigawatts of electricity.

[quickthrowman]

How do you capture and treat evaporated water? That is where data centers lose water, through evaporative cooling towers.

[al_borland]

Get rid of the cooling towers and condense the water, then treat like normal. Or put it into a closed loop with a radiator.

These are solved problems, I assume it’s just a question of cost and short-term vs long-term thinking.

It seems almost criminal that there are still so many people without safe water, and we’re using billions of gallons for temporary cooling of data centers, just to let it evaporate off.

Using a data center as a heat source for desalination may be another idea, where instead of data centers using fresh water, they could produce it. I looked into it briefly and it sounds like some universities and companies are exploring this. Instead of these data centers causing problems people want to avoid, they could solve problems people already have.

[colechristensen]

Evaporative cooling towers would be fine if it were a closed loop, the amount evaporated isn't worth that much concern. They're dumping ALL of the water that they intake after using it once. The evaporative or other cooling methods are just to lessen the environmental impact of dumping hot water back into the environment.

[inferiorhuman]

Sure. With the suggestion of locating them on the sites of old factories: how does data center water usage compare to the factories?

[jeffbee]

> over a billion gallons of water a year, equivalent to tens of thousands of homes.

So, basically none?

[butvacuum]

Here's another one: golf courses across the US are estimated to use 2 billion gallons per DAY.

700,000 gallons per acre per growing season for Corn, need to look up cover crop water for a per year figure.

500-2000gallons per pound of beef- and usda estimates place domestic production at 27Billion pounds per year.

We should be good stewards of our clean water (aquafers probably shouldn't be used unless they are of the self-filling variety), nor should down-river be deprived of their share. It's just Water use for forced convection evaporative cooling is not that much in the grand scheme, and most of it is used at the power plant rather than the DC.

[colechristensen]

The beef water quote is assuming the cattle are being fed irrigated crops. If you graze cattle on land you don't irrigate or feed cattle corn in places where you don't irrigate did you use thousands of gallons per animal or zero?

[colechristensen]

>700,000 gallons per acre per growing season for Corn, need to look up cover crop water for a per year figure.

You rewrote this comment, again this is very misleading.

My family has grown corn for 140ish years. In that time we have used exactly 0 gallons of water to grow corn. We don't irrigate, we don't have the mechanisms to irrigate, nobody in 100 miles irrigates (they do in far western Iowa and Nebraska and other marginal-to-grow-corn places) 80% of the corn grown in the US is grown with no irrigation.

It rains. That's it.

Even people who irrigate don't use that much water, they supplement the rain.

700,000 gallons per acre per year is the amount of water you'd have to use to grow corn in the desert which nobody does (I'm sure one or two crazies can be found on very small scales)

It is a disingenuous argument made either out of ignorance or manipulation.

[jeffbee]

I don't think 2 feet of irrigation per year is an outrageous claim, certainly you see that in western Kansas, and maybe half that amount in Nebraska. In California we need 2-3 feet per year, but California only has a small fraction of corn land compared to the corn belt states. And yes, that is stupid, but isn't that the point of this thread? People do outrageous stuff with water all over America to a far larger extent than anyone is proposing to do with data centers.

[butvacuum]

I'm somewhere south-ish in the US- We get the same amount of rain, but in torrents over a couple hours every 6 weeks with triple digit temperatures in between.

So, nothing disingenuous or even really ignorant on my part- just the idea that consistent rainfall can be trusted so much that crop failure due to no rain is an acceptable risk is alien enough it didn't cross my mind... Especially when I was mainly trying to put it in perspective. People space out when Billions come into play. So, I find comparisons with a factor <100 more digestible, and thought I'd share.

[colechristensen]

You're missing the point. We don't irrigate. 80% of corngrowers don't irrigate.

We don't have the irrigation hardware, we don't have the wells to irrigate, there is no irrigation.

It's an outrageous claim because it's false.

The folks who do irrigate corn more than a foot per year shouldn't be allowed. It is a huge unnecessary waste of water and we aren't lacking for corn production.

[jeffbee]

At least your stance on this topic is internally consistent, setting you apart from most of the commentariat. For that, I salute you.

As you have established, eastern Nebraska and western Iowa have an abundance of rain, surface water, and shallow aquifers. Would you then agree that it is a perfectly appropriate place for data centers?