Hacker News Reader

Comment by deckar01 | Hacker News Reader

Are you regularly filling Olympic sized pools and checking the water usage of an entire town in Nebraska? I would rather see this put into context by comparing it to other businesses normalized by power usage or square footage.

View on HN

Nebraska's main product is corn. Irrigated corn takes roughly 2 acre-feet of water, so the total DC water usage in the article (765M gallon) could irrigate 1k acres of corn. That's a single average-sized farm, not even a big operation. Calling a rounding error might be too generous.

No, I'm not checking the water usage of Olympic swimming pools, because I intuitively understand that they are not meaningful users of water.

>they are not meaningful users of water.

How so? NOT COUNTING leaks and filling, the average Olympic sized swimming pool uses 1-2 million gallons of water a year.

See EPA Commercial Pooland Spa Equipment Best Management Practices for Commercial and Institutional Facilities https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2023-11/ws-commer...

Yes. GP is literally saying that 1-2 million gallons of water is a pretty small number not meaningful to anything at scale.

It's basically like framing power consumption in watt hours. A million watt hours is tiny at any scale, your whole neighborhood uses millions every day.

Please compare 1 million gallons to the 1 quadrillion gallons in the aquifer, or the 31 trillion that falls from sky each year in Nebraska and get back to me.

A single average sized fully occupied apartment building uses 8-13 million gallons per year on average.

A typical single family home uses over 100K gallons.

I can see how a 0.27% increase in Lincoln’s water usage intuitively seems insignificant, but that was a a low usage data center in a large city. Papillion has 1/12 of Lincoln’s population, yet it’s data center used 42x more water. Assuming water usage was proportional to population it would have increased the city’s water usage ~136%.

It doesn't seem insignificant. It is in fact insignificant. And it supports one of the most popular and widely used consumer products of the last 100 years, so it seems like a pretty incredible bargain.

Tech companies are bundling AI into their base subscriptions and force feeding it to consumers, so I doubt the metrics they are reporting to their shareholders represent real demand or value.

Different state, but: almond trees growing in California consume 1 trillion gallons a year (estimated).

So probably we could grow fewer almonds in California.

How do you get the California water to this datacenter?

In other words, water scarcity is a distribution problem, not a globally finite resource problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com