Google gets OK to siphon water for South Carolina plant | Hacker News Reader

Google gets OK to siphon water for South Carolina plant

thestate.com

96 pointsJerry267 comments

>...granted Google permission Wednesday to pump 549 million gallons of water out of the ground each year to cool servers at its sprawling plant in Berkeley County.

>DHEC’s decision is the latest development in a bitter fight over whether the company should get state approval to withdraw from a major groundwater source that, critics say, is dwindling and in jeopardy of being further depleted.

Just put the warmed water back? It's not like it's being contaminated or anything.

I'd expect warmed groundwater will have unintended consequences for the biodiversity there; lots of essential bacteria and other small organisms would suffer.

And that is assuming they keep the groundwater as-is, without adding any additives, neutralizing the water, etc.

I have zero qualifications on that, but warming up the ground water sounds like a really good way to encourage anything living down there to rapidly multiply. And that is even if google's server cooling circulation was a sterile environment, which I highly doubt.

This water will be used in evaporative coolers. There won't be warmed water to return.

The water gets recycled 50-100 times, and each time a small percentage evaporates into a cloud.

The cloud really does make clouds.

Like this...

https://intra.ece.ucr.edu/~sren/project/water/img/water_cool...

How clouds are made! As my friend Tanya would say to keep me cheerful near those smokestacks.

Evaporative coolers in low country South Carolina? Is there a more humid place on Earth?

There won't be as soon as this plant becomes operational.

> as soon as this plant becomes operational

It's been operational for 10+ years. https://goo.gl/maps/XLEegK3rH1AqUXpw8

What’s stopping the collection and re-condensation of the evaporated water, which can then be returned to the river.

So.. cloud formation then rain?

To the extant that the local news knows anything, it is being reported here that the water will be returned to circulation (for lack of a better word) via the sewer, and its treatment cycle.

As supposed to... were they anticipating Google would be breaking down the water into component hydrogen and oxygen?

On one hand, at an industrial scale that isn't that much water: e.g. my local utility that serves 20,535 customer locations across 75 square miles provides about 2.2 billion gallons of water per year.

On the other hand, it's a fair amount of water for cooling... wag numbers ignoring the environmental conditions of their location (and water hardness) would have me guessing their load would be on the order 100 - 300 megawatts to need that much make-up water. Could be off by an order of magnitude, but clearly it's a lot of heat regardless.

I'm a water resources engineer. In my experience, this is approximately enough water to supply 15,000 people on an average daily basis.

Are you saying the average person uses 36,600 gal per year? That seems very high.

I'm not surprised by that number. Showering, flushing, washing dishes uses a lot of water

Yep. Bathing and flush toilets are huge.

It's crazy that potable water is used to flush toilets.

549mil gallons allowed to use in a year divided by 365 days equals 1,504,109 daily average for google (let's round to 1.5mil).

USGS estimates 80-100 gallons per American per day.

1,500,000 google's daily average water use / 100 gallons per American per day = 15,000

Google will use roughly the equivalent of 15,000 Americans worth of daily water.

Further math:

100 gallons per American per day x 365 days = 36,500 per person per year.

Edit: Had a before coffee typo and added some more math

Does that number include the water cost of the food we eat? Or is it only direct personal usage?

"Estimates vary, but, on average, each person uses about 80-100 gallons of water per day, for indoor home uses."

https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/water-science-school/scie...

If this was a rubber gasket plant in South Carolina getting a water permit, it would never have hit the news.

Do you have any evidence for this claim? Does comparing two separate things automatically make them equivalent?

On the flip side, when Foxconn wanted 7 million gallons of water each day from Lake Michigan for it's manufacturing plant, it hit the news.

- https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-foxconn-air-p...

How many news about getting water permit you heard last month? How many water permits are issued daily in the country?

So, it's safe to assume that you have no evidence?

The article itself links to another article they wrote on the usage of groundwater from mega farms. I don't know the answers to your questions because I don't track those things. I do have the ability to search Google and prove your initial claim wrong (before you moved the goalposts).

- Here's an article from 4 days ago about an unrelated project [1]

- And one from 3 days ago on a different project [2]

- Here's a different article from today about another project[3]

- One from last week in a different state [4]

[1] http://www.chroniclenewspaper.com/news/local-news/county-att...

[2] https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/401-water-quality-certific...

[3] https://www.enr.com/blogs/12-california-views/post/47743-cal...

[4] https://www.duncanbanner.com/oklahoma/news/gravel-mining-per...

>In addition to Google’s request in the Charleston area, mega farms in central South Carolina have been under scrutiny over the amount of groundwater they use to irrigate crops each summer.

549 million gallons is about 1685 acre feet, which isn't very much irrigation water. South Carolina golf courses alone use 9.7 million gallons/day of groundwater for irrigation or 3,540 million gallons per year. SC golf courses use a combined total of groundwater and surface water of 14,991 millon gallons per year.

https://waterdata.usgs.gov/sc/nwis/water_use?format=html_tab...

> South Carolina golf courses alone use 9.7 million gallons/day of groundwater for irrigation or 3,540 million gallons per year. SC golf courses use a combined total of groundwater and surface water of 14,991 millon gallons per year.

That's insane

SC has an area of 32,000 square miles or 20,480,000 acres. The average annual rainfall is about 4 feet. So that is about 80 million acre-feet of precipitation. Converting from acre feet to gallons gives 26,000,000 million gallons of rainfall annually. Depending on hurricanes, it could be more, much more.

I don't see why water used for cooling can't later be used as irrigation water

It might need chemicals so it doesn't rust or freeze pipes

Do they have or are they building the infrastructure to do that?

Or even put through a system to dissipate heat and reused

It evaporates in the chiller towers.

https://intra.ece.ucr.edu/~sren/project/water/img/water_cool...

...and then comes down as rain somewhere else, eventually.

So it is being reused for irrigation!

If that somewhere else is too far away it won't help refill South Carolina's aquifers.

Charleston is over the Florida aquifer system, which is one of the largest aquifer systems in the world since the peninsula is essentially a huge sedimentary filter that's saturated by really aggressive storms on a seasonal basis

> somewhere else

Typically the ocean.

Why ground water and not river water? Aquifers in CA are already collapsing and will not recover.

> "We strive to build sustainability into everything that we do"

I very much hope at least a part of the heat is converted back to electrical energy...

This isn’t always practical.

Why are they using plain groundwater to cool servers? Maybe I'm being naive here by thinking there is something much cooler they could do.

SC = The state of South Carolina, for non-American readers.

It's a shame that the article doesn't define acronyms on first use.

Thanks! I was unsure whether it stood for South Carolina or Santa Clara (close to where Google is based).

It’s a South Carolina newspaper.

I for one am glad that writers keep context in mind when writing things.

Otherwise your comment would have to be:

“SC = The state of South Carolina, one of the 50 states in the United States of America which is a country in the continent of North America and is often referred to as the USA, for people who don’t live in the USA.”

I think this is a good time to talk about one of my biggest pet peeves. Aggregators like HN, while extremely useful, remove context from the articles they link to. I think it’s extremely important for readers to read the links, after reading the site’s about page, and maybe quickly glancing through the Wikipedia, or bio page (of the author), if it exists.

Actively creating the context should be a skill we should be teaching children in school, since the Internet has made things that we would otherwise never have been aware of so easily accessible.

Reductio ad absurdum.

I'm sure that people who decided it were well compensated, who are you to disagree?

Extraordinary to claim that this decision is the result of corruption, you got any evidence or you just inventing stuff in your head?

Extraordinary? This happens all the time, maybe not with hard cash but plenty of other methods

It does but Google has a very very strict policy about not greasing wheels. People have been fired over it and not reimbursed for the out of pocket expense. It made building infrastructure in India take exponentially longer than competitors who were willing to play according to the unspoken rules. Google can't be trusted but not everything they do or every way they operate is bad.

Google has spent $21,770,000 on lobbying in 2018.

https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00006782...

So the implied argument is that lobbying is inherently corrupt?

In your opinion what differentiates the two?

One of them is illegal.

Aka: one of them can get executives put in prison.

Once you start lobbying/influencing what laws exist, you forfeit the right to justify your actions purely on what's legal.

Mainly: if you spend large amounts of money to stop an action becoming illegal or to make it legal, then you can't justify the action by saying "it's legal" without also justifying why it should be legal - given that you just assisted create a law. Amoral actors should not be allowed to control the legal system that keeps them in line.

Is there some evidence that Google has been a significant force lobbying in favor of the laws that make lobbying legal?

Legality, public disclosure and outcomes. Bribery is a way to ensure an outcome in your favor, regardless of law or process. Lobbying is using your resources to argue a position. Lobbying can be a corrupt process but it isn't inherently so and lobbying doesn't come with a guaranteed outcome.

The open secrets data includes independent contributions from Google employees. The engineers donating to Clinton in 2016 aren't engaging in corruption.

Wow using ground water to cool down computers? Is there no other water supply available?

Ofc a Google rep says how they are environmentally committed. Obv they'd never say if they didn't give a shit. What a useless comment.

Clean unpolluted ground water is probably the most precious resource there is.

Sewage (after treatment) can also be used to cool servers. Some big companies do this.

I'd guess groundwater was cheaper than sewage in this specific location.

what about seawater?

i know that san onofre used to be cooled that way... or do they require basically non saline water for this...

I would assume that they prefer to use "clean" ground water as opposed to sewage or seawater to minimize the buildup of waste or salt during the evaporation.

One would imagine the extra maintenance required would be very costly.

Saltwater is very expensive to use, since the remaining salt would clog evaporators, and the salt-concentrated water is pretty bad for the environment, so can't just be discharged.

Microsoft has experimented/is experimenting with lowering a datacenter right into the ocean, at least in part for the ease of cooling it.

> In fact, Naval Group adapted a heat-exchange process commonly used for cooling submarines to the underwater datacenter. The system pipes seawater directly through the radiators on the back of each of the 12 server racks and back out into the ocean. Findings from phase 1 of Project Natick indicate water from the datacenter rapidly mixes and dissipates in the surrounding currents.

https://news.microsoft.com/features/under-the-sea-microsoft-...

Seawater is very hard and harsh to deal with.

The intakes tend to clog with marine growth -- everything from barnacles and oysters to algae. Pipes have to be corrosion-reistant (not iron or steel). If you're using evaporative cooling, you end up with saline concentrate. If you're using dual-cycle systems ("clean" inner cooling loop, "dirty" outer loop), you have the issue of dumping thermal load into the oceans, which can affect sea life. And to boot, east-coast US seawater isn't all that cold due to the Gulf Stream -- 22-26C (72-76F) off the coast of the Carolinas, though subsurface temps may be lower. California's coastal waters are far cooler, about 15C (60F) presently, and dropping toward 10C (50F) in winter.

> Clean unpolluted ground water is probably the most precious resource there is.

Apparently not given that it costs peanuts.

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