Water Behind the Watts: The Hidden Risk of Powering Data Centers
ceres.org
ceres.org
Edit - good information on this here: https://news.bgov.com/environment-and-energy/data-centers-us...
The "Consumptive Use vs. Withdrawals" section discusses the trouble with using withdrawal as a meaningful data point.
The consequences to communities of hydroelectric dams are known to most communities, discoverable. And they don’t go into any place you want to put them. You don’t buy farms in farming communities next to the highway, and change the landscape.
It seems like data centers are a blind choice to some communities.
And as for the water, cooling water discharge is disastrous for trout fisheries. There was a big fight over a “25 football fields” warehouse near a class a trout stream in NY. No cooling water, but much concern about everything else that might effect this natural resource. (Heiden Road Warehouse Project proposed by Kroeger USA, LLC). Not a lot of communities have such a vocal, informed, and energized environmentally conscious community as you find with trout anglers. I have concern for those bass masters.
- If you're going to attribute water use via electricity to data centers you need to be fair and apply it to the rest of the electricity users. And in the end, you're just raising everyone's baseline water consumption in proportion to their electricity use. Why not leave the baseline increase out and leave water use attributed at the industry level (datacenters vs coal plants vs solar plants vs ...)?
- Different kinds of electrical generation plants use different amounts of water. To get an accurate number for an electricity consumer you're backing out the mix of generation sources in your model. You've introduced complexity to your model and reduced the precision of the answers your model gives when you could just get simpler and better answers leaving it at the industry level.
- Suppose we had a place with genuinely scarce water. There is some level of water draw that's unsustainable; you can never cross that level because it'll damage the environment. If there's ever a risk of hitting that limit you're interested in all users of water (so you can correctly model how much draw happens when XYZ business or person leaves the state) pushing you back to direct attribution at the industry level. If you can't model the effects of each choice correctly how do you know the choice you made will fix the problem?
I’d be fine seeing that compared to the water used by the rest of the normal electricity generation baseline I use.
People want to compare this to the pre-industrial rail buildouts, and sure there are some parallels, but I'd be curious to know if that period had the widespread political resentment towards to infrastructure construction that we're seeing today. Because I can also envision a scenario in which the capacity just doesn't get built since being pro-data center is becoming a political death sentence. And what happens then?
0: https://www.businessinsider.com/greg-abbott-texas-data-cente...
Generalizations unfortunately serve the subtle purpose of many people who are pro or anti datacenter, ironically while they use datacenters to write articles and use datacenters to post on social media, as well as consume video and nearly anything else.
For example the style and approaches datacenters built in desert like regions, which can be in the US, often misinform the overall understanding and conversation in this space.
Direct and indirect water use is an issue in many areas, its peculiar why it's being brought up when it's not comparing datacenters as a percentage of overall water use in an area.
The only thing an article like this tells you is that the author has an ax to grind.
> Most electricity is generated by power plants located in areas facing water stress or drought.
According to the report, the Colorado river flows through Arizona, and there are dams in Arizona that need the water to flow through them in order to produce electricity.
Remarkable insights.
What's sad about this all is that none of this is actually work that needs to be thrown out. You could absolutely use the data here in terms of informing yourself on "how at risk is the power generation capacity in these states during droughts, because it relies on water in the Colorado that might not always be available".
But instead we get bandwagon water use rage bait.
I am not kidding
They have endless cheap or even free power from the months/years of offgassing burning off methane, it can be seen from space
* https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/01/16/169511949/a...
And the water (and air) is already so toxically polluted from the fracking that no-one can live near or drink that water or they will get sick
It's a perfect match, again not kidding
Datacenters only need a few people to run it and they can live in highly filtered rooms like hospitals or cleanrooms, heck with bots+ai they won't even need people to run them eventually
California alone has about half a million acres of rice cultivation.
But big scary numbers are big and scary.
If we use electricity as a proxy, the problem isn't any particular datacenter it is obviously scale.
Also: people lie about water use. Over a decade ago, a day of searching for The Data led to exactly one defensible conclusion: if every household in CA ate 16 less almonds a day they would solve their water shortage... at least on paper. BTDT research.
Edit: Power generation uses the most water. Color me not surprised.
Do the facts matter? If the water issue is “fake” or overblown, but it’s resonating with voters who are packing town halls and ultimately effecting the change you want (a broad slowdown in the construction of new compute) is that a problem? Congress isn’t going to get off its ass. There is momentum here. Who actually cares if people are making misinformed choices if the outcome is correct? Isn’t this how literally all politics works?
(If you think the outcome is not correct, that’s a different debate entirely.)