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Google’s water use is soaring, consume more than 25% of water used in The Dalles
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- coorski 4y agoand. i bet the nsa uses more
- tmpburning 4y ago[flagged]
- downvotetruth 4y agoSeems like a waste of chlorine & flouride. Why Dalles & not say Hood River 24 mi downriver?
- VagueMag 4y agoLocal resident here: there's a hydroelectric facility that provides a lot of the power for the data centers in The Dalles. More generally, land is more plentiful and cheaper there than in Hood River.
- mind-blight 4y agoThe Dalles is also giving Google large property tax breaks to convince them to build there
- lokar 4y agoThere was also a defunct aluminum smelting plant, so lots of unused electrical infrastructure
- fisherjeff 4y agoWildly off-topic but it’s the holidays and there’s a certain sense of community in the air so why not: Howdy neighbor!
- zachrose 4y agoWhere does the water go after being used for cooling?
- bunabhucan 4y agoIt evaporates, the heat is used to evaporate the water.
- betaby 4y agoDo they heat it that much to evaporate a lot of it? I've read about one water cooled DC, don't remember which one exactly. But I do remember they were drawing water at around 15C and returning back to the river at 20C.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoThey're using evaporative cooling. It isn't just a basic heat exchanger.
- alexvoda 4y agoDumb question, but can't they condense the water and collect it somewhere?
- ksec 4y agoSame question. Why cant it be a closed loop system?
- justsomehnguy 4y agoDC would cook itself in a couple of hours. Closed loop system for a system this big and hungry would demand many km^2 of radiators with a forced air-flow. Look at your A/C external unit - it's barely handles 10-15C degree difference for a small room and that is for a human with a measly 300-500 BTU/h. A typical server is 2000 to 6000 BTU/h, depending on the configuration and a typical 42U rack would have at least 10-15 servers, not counting TOR switches and other shenanigans.
- stevespang 4y ago[dead]
- SQueeeeeL 4y ago[flagged]
- Gigachad 4y agoEvaporating water to cool servers seems like a pretty good thing to be doing. Much better than running air conditioners on electricity.
- tw98521358 4y agoI mean so what they just pump it through and send it back to the river probably cleaner then it originally was. What’s the problem? The water is not being wasted
- jkmcf 4y agoThe heat has to go somewhere. If it’s going into the river that’s very bad ecologically. They don’t address this in the article though.
- throwaway09223 4y ago> If it’s going into the river that’s very bad ecologically Not necessarily. I put heat into rivers every time I swim and it's a total non-issue. Heat could potentially be an issue in sufficient quantities - if for example Google doesn't have sufficient dissipation infrastructure before the water is returned to the river. We don't know whether or not this is the case. It would be irresponsible to make that assumption with a complete absence of evidence.
- cstoner 4y agoI'm not saying that there aren't potential problems, but warmer water coming off of power plants in Florida has acted as a bit of a manatee sanctuary. So it's not a guaranteed bad thing. It's actually a bit of a problem now that the power plants are starting to shut down.
- Calavar 4y agoThe header image for the article is a picture of steam rising up from their datacenter. Nearly all water that we use is eventually recycled. Steam will eventually come back down as rain, and rainwater works its way through the ground and into streams and rivers - the magic of the water cycle. Water is a renewable resource from that perspective. The issue is the rate at which we use it, because the water cycle is not instantaneous. If you use water faster than it can be recycled, you will find yourself running short. This is why water reservoir levels are dropping all along the Colorado river.
- thenoblesunfish 4y agoThe Dalles has a population of around 20k. This article is aimed at Oregon readers who might know that (or at least know it's not one of the few big cities in the state), but it's important context.
- wolpoli 4y agoFor anyone wondering, Google consumed 25% of water used in a city of 16000 people. This doesn't seem unreasonable.
- wkat4242 4y agoIf you're one of those 16,000 it would look a lot more unreasonable.
- jeffbee 4y agoRight. Better headline would be Google datacenters that serve half the continent consume only as much water as a few thousand houses. Or, possibly, insignificant human settlement consumes three times as much water as massive information system used by hundreds of millions of people.
- throwaway09223 4y agoThey don't even consume it. It sounds like they're measuring water passing through the facility as "use" -- possibly including for electrical generation. Imagine if people complained that the hoover dam used 100% of the Colorado river to power Las Vegas? In reality it uses 0%.
- moloch-hai 4y agoEvery drop that evaporates from the reservoir, that would not have from the naked river, is consumed. Every drop pumped out of the reservoir to irrigate desert farms, that could not have been without the dam, is consumed.
- cma 4y agoAnd if more evaporates from the resevoir, less outflows to the ocean directly.
- moloch-hai 4y ago
- throwaway09223 4y agoThis article makes several disingenuous statements to paint an entirely false, emotion provoking narrative. First: Google is not "consuming" water any more than a water wheel or dam turbine "consumes" water as it passes by in a river. This is an objectively absurd framing. Second: Even if the water were consumed, which it isn't, 25% of a town of 16k is not a significant amount of consumption. Third: This article talks about drought, which is absolutely irrelevant because the water isn't being consumed. The article can't directly say that google is culpable for water shortages, because they aren't, but it tries very hard to create this implication in the mind of lazy readers.
- GauntletWizard 4y agoA lot of the water is consumed, because The Dalles makes heavy use of evaporative cooling. But this is a data enter that powers most of Google's west-coast operations; it was like #3 by number of cores in my day (though it's been eclipsed since then, and I think there's several that are several times it's size). Cooling datacenters takes a lot of power and water, but a trivial amount compared to... Any heavy industry. Get me numbers compared to say Intel's Albuquerque fab, and then we'll talk.
- bunabhucan 4y ago"Water vapor rises above the cooling towers in The Dalles data center in Oregon. These plumes of water vapor create a quiet mist at dusk." https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/locations/the-dalles/ https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/locations/the-dalle... They are using evaporative cooling so the water isn't flowing downstream or going back into an aquifer or whatever. How is that not consumption?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- CGamesPlay 4y agoWhere's he water that passes through the facility go? Does it go into the fresh water reservoir for the city, or the sewer, or into a river? If it isn't going directly to the city's residents in some fashion without needing to be treated, I think it's pretty reasonable to say "consumed". To say it more succinctly: the water you flush down the toilet in your house is, in fact, "consumed".
- strangus 4y agoDelete your Gmail and save the planet!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- throwaway128128 4y agoThe Dalles is miniscule...
- ncr100 4y agoAnd so are their needs however Google is consuming more than it's share at leaving neighbor residents with dry wells.
- sbayona573 4y ago[flagged]
- we_never_see_it 4y ago[dead]
- jeffbee 4y agoI wish the article made a clearer case about what the supposed problem is. In the hydrographic context of The Dalles, 355 million gallons of water go by every couple of minutes. Given that fact, it must be that the datacenters are drawing on some local groundwater resource instead. But the article fails to tell us.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y agoI'm actually more interested in the linked article about the city suing the newspaper to withhold the usage data from the public record, apparently at the behest of Google. I understand Google is a major employer in the area, but the city acting like Google's minion seems wrong.
- sofixa 4y ago> I understand Google is a major employer in the area, but the city acting like Google's minion seems wrong. Major is a stretch, 200 employees in a 16,000 town.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y agoThat's even worse, then.
- CodeSgt 4y agoBut those 200 employees are probably earning ~10%+ of the towns GDP.
- sph 4y agoSo the people earning the other 90% do not count? I thought wealthier people doing whatever they want was a bad idea, but not if it's Googlers.
- CodeSgt 4y agoI didn't say that, but if you think the wealth Google provides those 200 doesn't benefit the remaining 16k then you're delusional.
- wkat4242 4y agoAhh the old trickle down fairytale
- ngoilapites 4y ago
- nightfly 4y agoIt would be nice if it could be cooled using water from the Columbia river instead of from the aquifer... I only live like 3miles from the data center but am on a different water source. Still, with increasing drought conditions it might contribute to increased costs and availability in the future. I already pay $75/m for water...
- brianwawok 4y agoThats literally in the article. Why they don't use river.
- nightfly 4y agoMaybe re-read my comment?
- seanb 4y agoLots of comments here suggesting that the water use is no big deal, but please note that Google is not using river water, they’re currently evaporating 29% of the municipal water, which comes from the aquifer, in a very dry region. The aquifer in question was being depleted prior to agriculture moving to river water and the local aluminum smelter shutting down, but it’s now healthy. Google’s planned use threatens to overdraw the aquifer. To offset Google’s use, the city plans to pump treated water into the aquifer. More context for the curious: https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2021/11/why-does-google-need-so-much-water-in-the-dalles-and-wheres-coming-from-qa.html https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2021/11/why-does-g...
- thenoblesunfish 4y agoThat's a very thorough article that answers all the natural questions. Among others, "why don't they just use river water?".
- upsidesinclude 4y agoThe amount of water being driven into the atmosphere will have interesting impact on the local vegetation. I find it interesting this never comes up in these articles discussing the impact of DC footprint. More alarming is the immense heat load coming from many other sites. A 50MW site is literally a space heater taking 50MW of power and convecting it into the atmosphere. I cannot imagine how that can avoid significant environmental impact.
- KirillPanov 4y agoPalo Verde has been evaporating 100% of the city of Phoenix's wastewater since the late 1980's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_... If driving insane amounts of humidity into desert air has any effect on desert ecosystems, we'd know by now. Mining groundwater is a big concern. Putting it back into the atmosphere afterward, not so much.
- jillesvangurp 4y agoJust looked up where this is: https://www.google.com/maps/place/The+Dalles+Google+Data+Center/@45.6319089,-121.2036031,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x54961ebdb45cdec5:0x4bde13efb5371001!8m2!3d45.6319052!4d-121.2010282 https://www.google.com/maps/place/The+Dalles+Google+Data+Cen... That's right on a big river. Why are they using aquifers at all over there? Edit: they are using the river. But why is this such a big issue? They evaporate some of it and dump the rest back in presumably?
- fnordpiglet 4y agoThank goodness we exploit these resources to ensure sufficient advertising