Google’s water use is soaring, consume more than 25% of water used in The Dalles | Hacker News Reader

Google’s water use is soaring, consume more than 25% of water used in The Dalles

oregonlive.com

101 pointsrguiscard76 comments

Lots of comments here suggesting that the water use is no big deal, but please note that Google is not using river water, they’re currently evaporating 29% of the municipal water, which comes from the aquifer, in a very dry region. The aquifer in question was being depleted prior to agriculture moving to river water and the local aluminum smelter shutting down, but it’s now healthy. Google’s planned use threatens to overdraw the aquifer. To offset Google’s use, the city plans to pump treated water into the aquifer.

More context for the curious: https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2021/11/why-does-g...

That's a very thorough article that answers all the natural questions. Among others, "why don't they just use river water?".

For anyone wondering, Google consumed 25% of water used in a city of 16000 people. This doesn't seem unreasonable.

Right. Better headline would be Google datacenters that serve half the continent consume only as much water as a few thousand houses. Or, possibly, insignificant human settlement consumes three times as much water as massive information system used by hundreds of millions of people.

They don't even consume it. It sounds like they're measuring water passing through the facility as "use" -- possibly including for electrical generation.

Imagine if people complained that the hoover dam used 100% of the Colorado river to power Las Vegas? In reality it uses 0%.

Every drop that evaporates from the reservoir, that would not have from the naked river, is consumed. Every drop pumped out of the reservoir to irrigate desert farms, that could not have been without the dam, is consumed.

And if more evaporates from the resevoir, less outflows to the ocean directly.

None of the Colorado River reaches the sea. In the past, it fed a delta of two million acres of prime wetland, key habitat for migrating birds. Today that is all desert.

The Sacramento River feeds the Sacramento delta, a thriving ecosystem. None of the water that reaches the sea was wasted.

But not because of hydroelectric. 0% of the water is "consumed" by hydropower, even if a huge percentage of the water passes through its turbines.

The water is siphoned off elsewhere for irrigation.

The primary purpose of some dams is for water control, whether to control flooding, provide for irrigation and consumption, or both. You cannot divorce the power station from the reservoir in judging a particular hydro dam's environmental impact, because generating power is only one purpose of the dam. The Hoover with Lake Mead is certainly, objectively, and effectively of this dual purpose.

Yes, but none of that consumes water.

In fact, the opposite is true: The dam makes more water available for consumption throughout the year.

Maintaining the reservoir consumes water, because it exposes thousands of times as much surface area for evaporation vs. a narrow river.

I fail to see what exactly this improves about the situation. It's the same aquifer whether it's underneath a cow pasture or a metropolis.

Regulations about aquifer management are not straightforward, and not exactly mature in the US.

Why isn’t that unreasonable?

If you're one of those 16,000 it would look a lot more unreasonable.

I'm actually more interested in the linked article about the city suing the newspaper to withhold the usage data from the public record, apparently at the behest of Google.

I understand Google is a major employer in the area, but the city acting like Google's minion seems wrong.

> I understand Google is a major employer in the area, but the city acting like Google's minion seems wrong.

Major is a stretch, 200 employees in a 16,000 town.

But those 200 employees are probably earning ~10%+ of the towns GDP.

So the people earning the other 90% do not count? I thought wealthier people doing whatever they want was a bad idea, but not if it's Googlers.

I didn't say that, but if you think the wealth Google provides those 200 doesn't benefit the remaining 16k then you're delusional.

The benefit is about prestige, not only about 200 families.

The primary benefit is 200 Google salaries stimulating the relatively small local economy.

The primary benefit for whom? And the secondary?

Do you think datacenter security and techs in a small town get paid the same as software engineers in Silicon Valley just because they work at Google?

Ahh the old trickle down fairytale

Data center has a few security guards. Everything is automated and run remotely. They fly people in from the UD if something needs to be done on site.

These places are basically windowless concrete boxes with a few underground basement levels. At least that's how it is done in my country where we worship ultra efficiency and employees are a liability you want to avoid as much as possible.

That's even worse, then.

The Dalles has a population of around 20k. This article is aimed at Oregon readers who might know that (or at least know it's not one of the few big cities in the state), but it's important context.

It would be nice if it could be cooled using water from the Columbia river instead of from the aquifer...

I only live like 3miles from the data center but am on a different water source. Still, with increasing drought conditions it might contribute to increased costs and availability in the future. I already pay $75/m for water...

Thats literally in the article. Why they don't use river.

Maybe re-read my comment?

I wish the article made a clearer case about what the supposed problem is. In the hydrographic context of The Dalles, 355 million gallons of water go by every couple of minutes. Given that fact, it must be that the datacenters are drawing on some local groundwater resource instead. But the article fails to tell us.

Just looked up where this is: https://www.google.com/maps/place/The+Dalles+Google+Data+Cen...

That's right on a big river. Why are they using aquifers at all over there?

Edit: they are using the river. But why is this such a big issue? They evaporate some of it and dump the rest back in presumably?

Where does the water go after being used for cooling?

It evaporates, the heat is used to evaporate the water.

Do they heat it that much to evaporate a lot of it? I've read about one water cooled DC, don't remember which one exactly. But I do remember they were drawing water at around 15C and returning back to the river at 20C.

They're using evaporative cooling. It isn't just a basic heat exchanger.

Dumb question, but can't they condense the water and collect it somewhere?

Same question. Why cant it be a closed loop system?

DC would cook itself in a couple of hours.

Closed loop system for a system this big and hungry would demand many km^2 of radiators with a forced air-flow. Look at your A/C external unit - it's barely handles 10-15C degree difference for a small room and that is for a human with a measly 300-500 BTU/h. A typical server is 2000 to 6000 BTU/h, depending on the configuration and a typical 42U rack would have at least 10-15 servers, not counting TOR switches and other shenanigans.

The hydrological cycle is already a closed loop system. The water you drink today watered a plant 10,000 years ago, passed through Abraham Lincoln's kidneys, or was drank by Genghis Khan.

how does that work? the chips are only 95°C do you use a refrigerant cycle to gain heat from there? it's hard to see how you could make this work

Maybe they could borrow cooling technology from the mechanism used by humans on hot days

The amount of water being driven into the atmosphere will have interesting impact on the local vegetation.

I find it interesting this never comes up in these articles discussing the impact of DC footprint.

More alarming is the immense heat load coming from many other sites. A 50MW site is literally a space heater taking 50MW of power and convecting it into the atmosphere.

I cannot imagine how that can avoid significant environmental impact.

Palo Verde has been evaporating 100% of the city of Phoenix's wastewater since the late 1980's:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_...

If driving insane amounts of humidity into desert air has any effect on desert ecosystems, we'd know by now.

Mining groundwater is a big concern. Putting it back into the atmosphere afterward, not so much.

Seems like a waste of chlorine & flouride. Why Dalles & not say Hood River 24 mi downriver?

Local resident here: there's a hydroelectric facility that provides a lot of the power for the data centers in The Dalles. More generally, land is more plentiful and cheaper there than in Hood River.

The Dalles is also giving Google large property tax breaks to convince them to build there

There was also a defunct aluminum smelting plant, so lots of unused electrical infrastructure

Wildly off-topic but it’s the holidays and there’s a certain sense of community in the air so why not: Howdy neighbor!

Thank goodness we exploit these resources to ensure sufficient advertising

I mean so what they just pump it through and send it back to the river probably cleaner then it originally was. What’s the problem? The water is not being wasted

The heat has to go somewhere. If it’s going into the river that’s very bad ecologically. They don’t address this in the article though.

> If it’s going into the river that’s very bad ecologically

Not necessarily. I put heat into rivers every time I swim and it's a total non-issue.

Heat could potentially be an issue in sufficient quantities - if for example Google doesn't have sufficient dissipation infrastructure before the water is returned to the river. We don't know whether or not this is the case. It would be irresponsible to make that assumption with a complete absence of evidence.

I'm not saying that there aren't potential problems, but warmer water coming off of power plants in Florida has acted as a bit of a manatee sanctuary. So it's not a guaranteed bad thing.

It's actually a bit of a problem now that the power plants are starting to shut down.

The header image for the article is a picture of steam rising up from their datacenter.

Nearly all water that we use is eventually recycled. Steam will eventually come back down as rain, and rainwater works its way through the ground and into streams and rivers - the magic of the water cycle. Water is a renewable resource from that perspective. The issue is the rate at which we use it, because the water cycle is not instantaneous. If you use water faster than it can be recycled, you will find yourself running short. This is why water reservoir levels are dropping all along the Colorado river.

By that logic nobody consumes or uses water. I think you are conflating local scarcity with global recycling. If I irrigate a new golf course in Arizona I am consuming scarce local water that will become rain in somewhere wet like Florida or Georgia or the Atlantic.

>This is why water reservoir levels are dropping all along the Colorado river.

This is very much a human made problem, but nobody is talking about it.

The flow rate through the dam has been increased to generate more power due to the lack of new baseline power generation capabilities. The demand comes from the shutdown of coal and gas fired powerplants across the west coast. The dam has to flow more water to generate more power and the water cannot be replaced fast enough.

Where has the river level gone up to match this increased flow rate?

and. i bet the nsa uses more

This article makes several disingenuous statements to paint an entirely false, emotion provoking narrative.

First: Google is not "consuming" water any more than a water wheel or dam turbine "consumes" water as it passes by in a river. This is an objectively absurd framing.

Second: Even if the water were consumed, which it isn't, 25% of a town of 16k is not a significant amount of consumption.

Third: This article talks about drought, which is absolutely irrelevant because the water isn't being consumed. The article can't directly say that google is culpable for water shortages, because they aren't, but it tries very hard to create this implication in the mind of lazy readers.

A lot of the water is consumed, because The Dalles makes heavy use of evaporative cooling. But this is a data enter that powers most of Google's west-coast operations; it was like #3 by number of cores in my day (though it's been eclipsed since then, and I think there's several that are several times it's size).

Cooling datacenters takes a lot of power and water, but a trivial amount compared to... Any heavy industry. Get me numbers compared to say Intel's Albuquerque fab, and then we'll talk.

"Water vapor rises above the cooling towers in The Dalles data center in Oregon. These plumes of water vapor create a quiet mist at dusk."

https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/locations/the-dalle...

They are using evaporative cooling so the water isn't flowing downstream or going back into an aquifer or whatever. How is that not consumption?

Where's he water that passes through the facility go? Does it go into the fresh water reservoir for the city, or the sewer, or into a river? If it isn't going directly to the city's residents in some fashion without needing to be treated, I think it's pretty reasonable to say "consumed".

To say it more succinctly: the water you flush down the toilet in your house is, in fact, "consumed".

But not consumed in the sense it's gone. It's then cleaned, and reconsumed, and then cleaned and ...

It goes back into the river, of course.

It uses evaporative cooling.

https://thatoregonlife.com/2021/09/google-to-expand-data-cen...

Note the picture: The water vapor mist from Data Center cooling towers at night

https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/locations/the-dalle...

> Water vapor rises above the cooling towers in The Dalles data center in Oregon. These plumes of water vapor create a quiet mist at dusk.

That is water that isn't being released back to the river, or reservoir, or aquifer (from which it came).

edit another source, though a bit old: https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/10/01/goog...

> Data center cooling is usually the area where the greatest savings can be realized. That's true for Google, which describes its use of evaporative cooling techniques, and provides a diagram of the workings of one of the cooling towers at its data center in The Dalles, Oregon.

Still, the evaporative cooling towers are the things that are there and take water from the ground and turn it into steam, released into the air.

Yeah, it looks like some (most?) water is evaporated -- but a significant portion is also returned to the river.

I saw elsewhere that google "consumes" around 4x as much water for hydroelectric power generation as they use for cooling. Hydroelectric will return essentially all the water back to the source.

The water from the river is regulated at a federal level - https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2021/11/why-does-g...

> Google’s data centers are right by the Columbia River. Why can’t the company just get its water out of the river?

> Federal law strictly governs water use from rivers. Anderson says withdrawals from the Columbia generally aren’t permitted.

> There are exceptions in cases where waters users can provide a “bucket for bucket replacement” of any water they pull out, Anderson told a city council meeting in September. In such a case, though, a water user would have to find water to put into the Columbia someplace else to compensate for water being pulled out by the city, or by Google.

So, if Google was to use Columbia river water, condense it, and then return exactly the amount that it took it, there wouldn't be an issue.

Instead, Goole is using water from the aquifer ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_Plateau_Aquifer_Syste... ) where it is getting depleted:

> Areas where groundwater depletion is a concern are in the Umatilla area, and the Palouse slope. In the Umatilla area, total decline since the 1970s is from 300 ft to 100 ft of water height. Overall, between 1968-2009, mean groundwater decline across the aquifer system was at 1.0 ft/year.

The Dalles is part of the Umatilla syncline (see page 9 https://people.wou.edu/~taylors/g473/gonthier_1985.pdf ).

Ah, that makes sense, thank you. I assumed Google was using river water.

Heres a link to Google's own water report calling it "consumption", linked in the article

https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/2022-us-data-...

Delete your Gmail and save the planet!

The Dalles is miniscule...

And so are their needs however Google is consuming more than it's share at leaving neighbor residents with dry wells.

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