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Comment by wolpoli | Hacker News Reader

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.

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