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Google gets OK to siphon water for South Carolina plant
- andy_boot 7y agoI don't see why water used for cooling can't later be used as irrigation water
- homero 7y agoIt might need chemicals so it doesn't rust or freeze pipes
- pmontra 7y agoDo they have or are they building the infrastructure to do that?
- MaximumYComb 7y agoOr even put through a system to dissipate heat and reused
- tyingq 7y agoIt evaporates in the chiller towers. https://intra.ece.ucr.edu/~sren/project/water/img/water_cooling.jpg https://intra.ece.ucr.edu/~sren/project/water/img/water_cool...
- userbinator 7y ago...and then comes down as rain somewhere else, eventually.
- LeifCarrotson 7y agoSo it is being reused for irrigation!
- adrianN 7y agoIf that somewhere else is too far away it won't help refill South Carolina's aquifers.
- tomatotomato37 7y agoCharleston is over the Florida aquifer system, which is one of the largest aquifer systems in the world since the peninsula is essentially a huge sedimentary filter that's saturated by really aggressive storms on a seasonal basis
- auiya 7y ago> somewhere else Typically the ocean.
- swebs 7y ago>...granted Google permission Wednesday to pump 549 million gallons of water out of the ground each year to cool servers at its sprawling plant in Berkeley County. >DHEC’s decision is the latest development in a bitter fight over whether the company should get state approval to withdraw from a major groundwater source that, critics say, is dwindling and in jeopardy of being further depleted. Just put the warmed water back? It's not like it's being contaminated or anything.
- stingraycharles 7y agoI'd expect warmed groundwater will have unintended consequences for the biodiversity there; lots of essential bacteria and other small organisms would suffer. And that is assuming they keep the groundwater as-is, without adding any additives, neutralizing the water, etc.
- black_puppydog 7y agoI have zero qualifications on that, but warming up the ground water sounds like a really good way to encourage anything living down there to rapidly multiply. And that is even if google's server cooling circulation was a sterile environment, which I highly doubt.
- londons_explore 7y agoThis water will be used in evaporative coolers. There won't be warmed water to return. The water gets recycled 50-100 times, and each time a small percentage evaporates into a cloud. The cloud really does make clouds.
- ensiferum 7y agoWow using ground water to cool down computers? Is there no other water supply available? Ofc a Google rep says how they are environmentally committed. Obv they'd never say if they didn't give a shit. What a useless comment. Clean unpolluted ground water is probably the most precious resource there is.
- londons_explore 7y agoSewage (after treatment) can also be used to cool servers. Some big companies do this. I'd guess groundwater was cheaper than sewage in this specific location.
- andrekandre 7y agowhat about seawater? i know that san onofre used to be cooled that way... or do they require basically non saline water for this...
- melcor 7y agoI would assume that they prefer to use "clean" ground water as opposed to sewage or seawater to minimize the buildup of waste or salt during the evaporation. One would imagine the extra maintenance required would be very costly.
- londons_explore 7y agoSaltwater is very expensive to use, since the remaining salt would clog evaporators, and the salt-concentrated water is pretty bad for the environment, so can't just be discharged.
- jborichevskiy 7y agoMicrosoft has experimented/is experimenting with lowering a datacenter right into the ocean, at least in part for the ease of cooling it. > In fact, Naval Group adapted a heat-exchange process commonly used for cooling submarines to the underwater datacenter. The system pipes seawater directly through the radiators on the back of each of the 12 server racks and back out into the ocean. Findings from phase 1 of Project Natick indicate water from the datacenter rapidly mixes and dissipates in the surrounding currents. https://news.microsoft.com/features/under-the-sea-microsoft-tests-a-datacenter-thats-quick-to-deploy-could-provide-internet-connectivity-for-years/ https://news.microsoft.com/features/under-the-sea-microsoft-...
- Hitton 7y agoI'm sure that people who decided it were well compensated, who are you to disagree?
- StartupTree 7y agoExtraordinary to claim that this decision is the result of corruption, you got any evidence or you just inventing stuff in your head?
- reustle 7y agoExtraordinary? This happens all the time, maybe not with hard cash but plenty of other methods
- igetspam 7y agoIt does but Google has a very very strict policy about not greasing wheels. People have been fired over it and not reimbursed for the out of pocket expense. It made building infrastructure in India take exponentially longer than competitors who were willing to play according to the unspoken rules. Google can't be trusted but not everything they do or every way they operate is bad.
- swebs 7y agoGoogle has spent $21,770,000 on lobbying in 2018. https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000067823&year=2018 https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00006782...
- joeyrideout 7y agoSC = The state of South Carolina, for non-American readers. It's a shame that the article doesn't define acronyms on first use.
- EdSchouten 7y agoThanks! I was unsure whether it stood for South Carolina or Santa Clara (close to where Google is based).
- thawaway1837 7y agoIt’s a South Carolina newspaper. I for one am glad that writers keep context in mind when writing things. Otherwise your comment would have to be: “SC = The state of South Carolina, one of the 50 states in the United States of America which is a country in the continent of North America and is often referred to as the USA, for people who don’t live in the USA.” I think this is a good time to talk about one of my biggest pet peeves. Aggregators like HN, while extremely useful, remove context from the articles they link to. I think it’s extremely important for readers to read the links, after reading the site’s about page, and maybe quickly glancing through the Wikipedia, or bio page (of the author), if it exists. Actively creating the context should be a skill we should be teaching children in school, since the Internet has made things that we would otherwise never have been aware of so easily accessible.
- atomlib 7y agoReductio ad absurdum.
- Koffiepoeder 7y ago> "We strive to build sustainability into everything that we do" I very much hope at least a part of the heat is converted back to electrical energy...
- saagarjha 7y agoThis isn’t always practical.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- nullc 7y agoOn one hand, at an industrial scale that isn't that much water: e.g. my local utility that serves 20,535 customer locations across 75 square miles provides about 2.2 billion gallons of water per year. On the other hand, it's a fair amount of water for cooling... wag numbers ignoring the environmental conditions of their location (and water hardness) would have me guessing their load would be on the order 100 - 300 megawatts to need that much make-up water. Could be off by an order of magnitude, but clearly it's a lot of heat regardless.
- engineer_22 7y agoI'm a water resources engineer. In my experience, this is approximately enough water to supply 15,000 people on an average daily basis.
- driverdan 7y agoAre you saying the average person uses 36,600 gal per year? That seems very high.
- dastx 7y agoI'm not surprised by that number. Showering, flushing, washing dishes uses a lot of water
- newnewpdro 7y agoYep. Bathing and flush toilets are huge. It's crazy that potable water is used to flush toilets.
- corodra 7y ago549mil gallons allowed to use in a year divided by 365 days equals 1,504,109 daily average for google (let's round to 1.5mil). USGS estimates 80-100 gallons per American per day. 1,500,000 google's daily average water use / 100 gallons per American per day = 15,000 Google will use roughly the equivalent of 15,000 Americans worth of daily water. Further math: 100 gallons per American per day x 365 days = 36,500 per person per year. Edit: Had a before coffee typo and added some more math
- jmknoll 7y agoDoes that number include the water cost of the food we eat? Or is it only direct personal usage?
- corodra 7y ago"Estimates vary, but, on average, each person uses about 80-100 gallons of water per day, for indoor home uses." https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/water-science-school/science/water-qa-how-much-water-do-i-use-home-each-day?qt-science_center_objects=0#qt-science_center_objects https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/water-science-school/scie...
- xyzzyz 7y agoIf this was a rubber gasket plant in South Carolina getting a water permit, it would never have hit the news.
- gotAnyEvidence 7y agoDo you have any evidence for this claim? Does comparing two separate things automatically make them equivalent? On the flip side, when Foxconn wanted 7 million gallons of water each day from Lake Michigan for it's manufacturing plant, it hit the news. - https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-foxconn-air-pollution-20180129-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-foxconn-air-p...
- xyzzyz 7y agoHow many news about getting water permit you heard last month? How many water permits are issued daily in the country?
- gotAnyEvidence 7y agoSo, it's safe to assume that you have no evidence? The article itself links to another article they wrote on the usage of groundwater from mega farms. I don't know the answers to your questions because I don't track those things. I do have the ability to search Google and prove your initial claim wrong (before you moved the goalposts). - Here's an article from 4 days ago about an unrelated project [1] - And one from 3 days ago on a different project [2] - Here's a different article from today about another project[3] - One from last week in a different state [4] [1] http://www.chroniclenewspaper.com/news/local-news/county-attorney-says-greens-of-chester-has-water-permit-BB560120 http://www.chroniclenewspaper.com/news/local-news/county-att... [2] https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/401-water-quality-certification-26357/ https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/401-water-quality-certific... [3] https://www.enr.com/blogs/12-california-views/post/47743-california-supreme-court-rejects-environmental-challenges-to-monterey-water-project https://www.enr.com/blogs/12-california-views/post/47743-cal... [4] https://www.duncanbanner.com/oklahoma/news/gravel-mining-permit-application-prompts-concerns/article_60a243b5-4fa4-544c-95cc-efa981b36759.html https://www.duncanbanner.com/oklahoma/news/gravel-mining-per...
- sitkack 7y agoWhy ground water and not river water? Aquifers in CA are already collapsing and will not recover.
- Merrill 7y ago>In addition to Google’s request in the Charleston area, mega farms in central South Carolina have been under scrutiny over the amount of groundwater they use to irrigate crops each summer. 549 million gallons is about 1685 acre feet, which isn't very much irrigation water. South Carolina golf courses alone use 9.7 million gallons/day of groundwater for irrigation or 3,540 million gallons per year. SC golf courses use a combined total of groundwater and surface water of 14,991 millon gallons per year. https://waterdata.usgs.gov/sc/nwis/water_use?format=html_table&rdb_compression=file&wu_area=State+Total&wu_year=2015&wu_category=IG&wu_category_nms=Irrigation%252C%2BGolf%2BCourses https://waterdata.usgs.gov/sc/nwis/water_use?format=html_tab...
- galkk 7y ago> South Carolina golf courses alone use 9.7 million gallons/day of groundwater for irrigation or 3,540 million gallons per year. SC golf courses use a combined total of groundwater and surface water of 14,991 millon gallons per year. That's insane
- Merrill 7y agoSC has an area of 32,000 square miles or 20,480,000 acres. The average annual rainfall is about 4 feet. So that is about 80 million acre-feet of precipitation. Converting from acre feet to gallons gives 26,000,000 million gallons of rainfall annually. Depending on hurricanes, it could be more, much more.
- zannaxy 7y agoWhy are they using plain groundwater to cool servers? Maybe I'm being naive here by thinking there is something much cooler they could do.