Data center drains 30M gals of water — until residents complained of pressure | Hacker News Reader

Data center drains 30M gals of water — until residents complained of pressure

politico.com

43 pointsthehoff20 comments

I had some questions in my mind about DCs using closed loop systems and read the article a little. In case anyone else also has similar thoughts: —-

The company said its water consumption was so high last year because of temporary construction-related activities, such as concrete work, dust control and site preparation. Once operational, the company said the data centers only will use water for domestic needs, such as bathrooms and kitchens. That will total the equivalent of what four U.S. households use per month, the spokesperson said. That may not happen for another few years, however. The company is still actively building and expanding its Fayetteville data center campus. It aims to finish in three to five years.

——

I was just thinking about this relative to the headlines that datacenters don't consume as much water as we think, so thanks

Will is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this paragraph.

I'm sure that's the plan; I'm also sure a MBA will suddenly be in charge of operations and compare their cooling bills with their water bills and conclude it's cheaper to just pump water than run the cooling units.

This industry line about closed loop systems not using much water is so pervasive on HN and so wrong. So many people are spreading industry propaganda

First of all, only about 10% of data centers use closed-loop systems. Pointing to a technology that technically exists but is far from standard to represent the entire industry is ridiculous.

Second of all, these facilities do NOT infinitely recycle water. They must regularly "bleed the lines" to remove toxic sludge. The build-up of PFAS is of particular concern. Not to mention the water itself needs to be treated with anti-freezes, anti-fungals, and anticorrosives in order to last multiple cycles.

They also require about 40% more electricity usage. So the trade off is about 70% less water for 40% more electricity and an extremely toxic sludge problem.

TL;DR: closed loop systems are a tiny minority of DCs and their net benefits over open loop are not even clear

From about 5 minutes of digging, I found the below which perhaps helps to put the 29m gallons in context.

> The Fayette County Water System has a total production capacity of 22.8 million gallons per day (MGD).

Source: hhttps://fayettega.org/doing-business/global-access-infrastru...

So...keeping things simple and using months of 30 days:

Using 29M gallons over 15 months = 29,000,000 / (15 * 30) = 64,444 gallons per day avg

Based on 22.8m daily production capacity that's less than 0.3% of the total production capacity per day.

(Happy to be corrected if my napkin maths is wrong / i'm missing something here!)

Private equity (Blackstone in this case).

Why am I not surprised? Sleaze through and through.

Water usage is often a red herring compared to how much power, noise, and pollution a gigascale DC uses/creates.

Weird comment on an article where that literally isn’t the case.

I can’t tell if it’s just bot-driven nonsense, not reading the text, or just dishonesty masquerading as commentary.

Do you have anything constructive or non ad hominem to say?

I think you should apologize for being a complete asshat.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you were truly committed to substantive conversation here you would've read the article before posting.

Less than 10% of data centers used closed loop systems and even closed loop requires regular evaporation of the water which builds up into toxic sludge after a few cycles—the biggest concern being the PFAS and the anti-freeze and anti-corrosives they add to the water

I think you should post substantively about the actual fucking article, instead of musing about nonsense, but here we are.

Call me more names, though, bro. That’ll beat the AI allegations.

Suggested: Data center drains 30M gals of water — until residents complained of pressure

.. at least add the d back to the end

Updated.

... but don't send any data centers in space where you will have to dump your heat directly by thermal radiation towards the cold CMB... /s

How do you dissipate so much heat in vacuum? Datacenters will need to boil something like water and then dump it somewhere.

Just like satellites do: heat pipes and radiators.

Not that space DCs are a good idea™ or economical otherwise.

Economics are not the main concern if nobody wants them on Earth.

Do you think data centers and the average satellite generate an equivalent amount of heat?

Sats are optimized for low energy usage. DCs, on the other hand, are water boilers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com