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Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

Context: 1 acre-foot, a usual unit of measure for agricultural water, is a bit under 1/3 of a million gallons. 17B gallons is about 52k acre-feet.

Vs. just the state of Arizona's historic water allocation, from just the Colorado River system, is over 2M acre-feet. Which, if you're familiar, has created a whole industry of growing extremely water-hungry but rather low-value crops in the desert.

The latest Federal plan to cope with long-term drought in the Colorado River system will cut Arizona's allocation by about 750,000k acre-feet. Vs. that headline about 52k, across the whole US of A.

Yes, locally, data center water use can be a serious issue. And it's useful rhetoric if you are already an anti-data center partisan. But if you're thinking that cutting off water to DC's could fix anything more than some local & isolated problems - sorry, no.

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Completely agree. Specifically:

If you are anti-datacenter, then the water argument might look appealing to you, but its NOT a good argument, and it makes not only look you like an innumerate idiot, it also negatively impacts adjacent environmental movements/concerns.

So don't push it.

It’s more nuanced, the water consumption can be a real local problem. The evaporated water doesn’t necessarily come back to the original source, and if the water supply was already stressed you’re adding even more pressure to it. You have to look about the actual details, like all arguments about resource consumption

Yeah, but the anti-datacentre people won't care about that. That is an issue for local people and specific cases. Myrmidon isn't addressing the comment at people who have actual local issues with water issues; it was advice for the partisans.

You'd have to look locally at individual datacenter projects then and not be against all of them.

If it's really the case that a local municipality grants a new datacenter to be built that already has a stressed water supply, the people in the area should complain, and if nothing is done then we can be mad at just that ONE datacenter/company. Not the entire industry.

But I just don't see that happening. Noone is going without water because of datacenters. Noone is going without water other than people in California who get there's stolen from farms. That's a real issue, not a hypothetical.

Correct, yes, aggregate numbers aren’t too meaningful. I mentioned it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49434170

Though you can also be mad at the industry as a whole, an industry where leaders scream as loud as possible how they will make your life worse. I think it’s perfectly justified. And DCs are a perfect fit for that, you have a huge ominous monolith to point at that nobody wants to have around them

> Though you can also be mad at the industry as a whole, an industry where leaders scream as loud as possible how they will make your life worse. I think it’s perfectly justified. And DCs are a perfect fit for that, you have a huge ominous monolith to point at that nobody wants to have around them

This is exactly my problem. I'm not saying you're wrong about this in any way. But your (and many others) core problem with datacenters is not actually the water use. The water argument is just a strawman to increase environmental legitimacy, and thats a really bad and harmful practice (I do realize that this might seem minor given incompetent political leadership that spews uninformed drivel all day, but coherency and correctness still matter!)

The water argument is simply never helpful. If water is scarce locally, then let local administration reject datacenter projects for exactly that reason. If they fail to do that, fix/campaign against the local administration (because that's where the problem is at). But blanket arguing against datacenter buildout because of water usage is just bad-faith campaigning, and it is gonna hurt credibility elsewhere.

I want to understand if we're really comparing apples to apples. What does 'consumption' mean in these contexts? How much of the water returns to the local water table vs evaporation vs becomes waste water?

Well in agriculture the water "consumed" is returned with a whole bunch of chemical runoff.

In datacenters the water "consumed" is returned with a whole bunch of...water.

heat, too.

The question is how much is returned to the original source. Given that the water is ~100% evaporated in the case of DCs it’s a genuine and reasonable question to ask

No, the water is extremely hot. It takes a massive amount of infrastructure before this water can be "released." Unless you are one of those massive polluters that think discharging extremely hot water into the ground is safe and not something that immediately kills the life it's dumped into.

At least ~30% of water is evaporated when you use it in agriculture (that is the whole point; plants typically don't go the the trouble of absorbing water just to pump it back into the ground).

Even if you use such an extremely conservative ratio (and assume that all water used in datacenters is 100% evaporated away for cooling) the argument stands.

Golf courses use about 1.63 million acre feet, about 32X more, some of that probably reenters watersheds and aquifers, not necessarily great with fertilizer runoff. But they pose lower risk of human extinction, so have that going for them.

Most of those partisans have no idea what other sources of water consumption are by magnitude. They seem to quote any number as if it is a lot. A billion gallons is a lot. 500000 gallons is not a lot.

Each datacenter uses as much water as 1,000 homes. You're welcome to put such resource constraints in your own local community if you don't care about the increased demand.

On the other hand, many homes could mothballing a misplaced farm provide water for?

As far as I know, there's not a single place in the world where someone went without water to cook, drink, or bathe because a data center consumed it.

Completely non responsive

That is a number that gets quoted, but I just ran the latest numbers for my local city.

A couple of dozen planned data centers, with an estimated combined use of 160k gallons per day.

Apparently the average household uses 300 gallons a day, which seems insane to me. I guess a lot of people water their lawns. That gets us to a mere 23 households per data center. Even with 100 gallons per day per household or less, the local data centers are not at 1000 households per data center.

And where I live, water is not a concern. They are building a pipe out from Lake Michigan, which has been in the works now for 10 years. That primarily gets the tri-city area off of the aquifers which have been drained at an unsustainable rate for the last 100 years.

If I lived along the Colorado river system, that's a different discussion.

The Colorado water system is a disaster that long predates the invention of computers. The way water rights are implemented in the western US (doctrine of prior appropriation) meant that anyone who owned land through which the river flowed could take enough of it to plant lettuce in the desert. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuma_Lettuce_Days

That's nuts. These practices took so much water that native populations could no longer sustain themselves from the river. Complaints about the relatively low use of water by data centers seems pretty weak in comparison, although I still wouldn't locate them in the desert; the desert is a better place to load up with solar and wind farms.

https://coloradoriverscience.org/Water_law_and_policy if you're interested.

> The Colorado water system is a disaster that long predates the invention of computers.

Totally agree, and that's part of why I was bringing it up. I recently was going down the rabbit hole of the story of the Salton Sea. Absolutely insane.

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