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They still sometimes use water from limited resources or add a nontrivial amount of heat to a natural body of water or river. They also often pull it out of aq

They still sometimes use water from limited resources or add a nontrivial amount of heat to a natural body of water or river. They also often pull it out of aquifers. The largest data center I can find is in Iowa and uses over a billion gallons of water a year, equivalent to tens of thousands of homes. Now Iowa probably has more water than almost anywhere, but still. Protesting the usage is valid.

inferiorhuman 11mo ago
Sure. With the suggestion of locating them on the sites of old factories: how does data center water usage compare to the factories?
jeffbee 11mo ago
> over a billion gallons of water a year, equivalent to tens of thousands of homes. So, basically none?
- butvacuum 11mo ago
  Here's another one: golf courses across the US are estimated to use 2 billion gallons per DAY. 700,000 gallons per acre per growing season for Corn, need to look up cover crop water for a per year figure. 500-2000gallons per pound of beef- and usda estimates place domestic production at 27Billion pounds per year. We should be good stewards of our clean water (aquafers probably shouldn't be used unless they are of the self-filling variety), nor should down-river be deprived of their share. It's just Water use for forced convection evaporative cooling is not that much in the grand scheme, and most of it is used at the power plant rather than the DC.
  - colechristensen 11mo ago
    The beef water quote is assuming the cattle are being fed irrigated crops. If you graze cattle on land you don't irrigate or feed cattle corn in places where you don't irrigate did you use thousands of gallons per animal or zero?
  - colechristensen 11mo ago
    >700,000 gallons per acre per growing season for Corn, need to look up cover crop water for a per year figure. You rewrote this comment, again this is very misleading. My family has grown corn for 140ish years. In that time we have used exactly 0 gallons of water to grow corn. We don't irrigate, we don't have the mechanisms to irrigate, nobody in 100 miles irrigates (they do in far western Iowa and Nebraska and other marginal-to-grow-corn places) 80% of the corn grown in the US is grown with no irrigation. It rains. That's it. Even people who irrigate don't use that much water, they supplement the rain. 700,000 gallons per acre per year is the amount of water you'd have to use to grow corn in the desert which nobody does (I'm sure one or two crazies can be found on very small scales) It is a disingenuous argument made either out of ignorance or manipulation.
    - jeffbee 11mo ago
      I don't think 2 feet of irrigation per year is an outrageous claim, certainly you see that in western Kansas, and maybe half that amount in Nebraska. In California we need 2-3 feet per year, but California only has a small fraction of corn land compared to the corn belt states. And yes, that is stupid, but isn't that the point of this thread? People do outrageous stuff with water all over America to a far larger extent than anyone is proposing to do with data centers.
      - butvacuum 11mo ago
        I'm somewhere south-ish in the US- We get the same amount of rain, but in torrents over a couple hours every 6 weeks with triple digit temperatures in between. So, nothing disingenuous or even really ignorant on my part- just the idea that consistent rainfall can be trusted so much that crop failure due to no rain is an acceptable risk is alien enough it didn't cross my mind... Especially when I was mainly trying to put it in perspective. People space out when Billions come into play. So, I find comparisons with a factor <100 more digestible, and thought I'd share.
      - colechristensen 11mo ago
        You're missing the point. We don't irrigate. 80% of corngrowers don't irrigate. We don't have the irrigation hardware, we don't have the wells to irrigate, there is no irrigation. It's an outrageous claim because it's false. The folks who do irrigate corn more than a foot per year shouldn't be allowed. It is a huge unnecessary waste of water and we aren't lacking for corn production.
al_borland 11mo ago
Wouldn’t a water treatment plant solve this, so water can be reused and they aren’t pumping it out of the ground, using it for cooling briefly, then dumping it? This idea of constant fresh water being used doesn’t make much sense to me.
- colechristensen 11mo ago
  >This idea of constant fresh water being used doesn’t make much sense to me. They're taking advantage of inappropriately priced industrial water. Regardless of if it makes sense, that's what they're doing. Using a lot of cold groundwater and then dumping it. It would be much more expensive to have a closed loop of cooling water (and you're not going to get a lot of cooling on a humid 90 degree Iowa summer day)
  - al_borland 11mo ago
    Seems like northern Canada would be a good spot. Plenty of water and cold, and not many people to object to living next door. For most of the year they could just run the pipes outside to cool them down.
    - bryan_w 11mo ago
      >Plenty of water and cold, People say the same thing about Michigan, yet, here we are
      - al_borland 11mo ago
        Averages in a place like Nunavut are below freezing 8 months of the year. Averages in Michigan are only below freezing 1 month of the year (according to wherever Apple Weather pulls their weather averages) The population in Nunavut is 40,000 vs 10M in Michigan, despite Nunavut being 21x larger than Michigan. That ends up being 0.05/sq mi in Nunavut vs 174/sq mi in Michigan. Northern Canada is much colder, has more fresh water, and has drastically lower population density, which should make it easier to find an area where people won't complain (other than environmentalists), and they would be able to better leverage nature for most of the year to help with cooling costs.

inferiorhuman 11mo ago

Sure. With the suggestion of locating them on the sites of old factories: how does data center water usage compare to the factories?

jeffbee 11mo ago

> over a billion gallons of water a year, equivalent to tens of thousands of homes. So, basically none?

butvacuum 11mo ago
Here's another one: golf courses across the US are estimated to use 2 billion gallons per DAY. 700,000 gallons per acre per growing season for Corn, need to look up cover crop water for a per year figure. 500-2000gallons per pound of beef- and usda estimates place domestic production at 27Billion pounds per year. We should be good stewards of our clean water (aquafers probably shouldn't be used unless they are of the self-filling variety), nor should down-river be deprived of their share. It's just Water use for forced convection evaporative cooling is not that much in the grand scheme, and most of it is used at the power plant rather than the DC.
- colechristensen 11mo ago
  The beef water quote is assuming the cattle are being fed irrigated crops. If you graze cattle on land you don't irrigate or feed cattle corn in places where you don't irrigate did you use thousands of gallons per animal or zero?
- colechristensen 11mo ago
  >700,000 gallons per acre per growing season for Corn, need to look up cover crop water for a per year figure. You rewrote this comment, again this is very misleading. My family has grown corn for 140ish years. In that time we have used exactly 0 gallons of water to grow corn. We don't irrigate, we don't have the mechanisms to irrigate, nobody in 100 miles irrigates (they do in far western Iowa and Nebraska and other marginal-to-grow-corn places) 80% of the corn grown in the US is grown with no irrigation. It rains. That's it. Even people who irrigate don't use that much water, they supplement the rain. 700,000 gallons per acre per year is the amount of water you'd have to use to grow corn in the desert which nobody does (I'm sure one or two crazies can be found on very small scales) It is a disingenuous argument made either out of ignorance or manipulation.
  - jeffbee 11mo ago
    I don't think 2 feet of irrigation per year is an outrageous claim, certainly you see that in western Kansas, and maybe half that amount in Nebraska. In California we need 2-3 feet per year, but California only has a small fraction of corn land compared to the corn belt states. And yes, that is stupid, but isn't that the point of this thread? People do outrageous stuff with water all over America to a far larger extent than anyone is proposing to do with data centers.
    - butvacuum 11mo ago
      I'm somewhere south-ish in the US- We get the same amount of rain, but in torrents over a couple hours every 6 weeks with triple digit temperatures in between. So, nothing disingenuous or even really ignorant on my part- just the idea that consistent rainfall can be trusted so much that crop failure due to no rain is an acceptable risk is alien enough it didn't cross my mind... Especially when I was mainly trying to put it in perspective. People space out when Billions come into play. So, I find comparisons with a factor <100 more digestible, and thought I'd share.
    - colechristensen 11mo ago
      You're missing the point. We don't irrigate. 80% of corngrowers don't irrigate. We don't have the irrigation hardware, we don't have the wells to irrigate, there is no irrigation. It's an outrageous claim because it's false. The folks who do irrigate corn more than a foot per year shouldn't be allowed. It is a huge unnecessary waste of water and we aren't lacking for corn production.

al_borland 11mo ago

Wouldn’t a water treatment plant solve this, so water can be reused and they aren’t pumping it out of the ground, using it for cooling briefly, then dumping it? This idea of constant fresh water being used doesn’t make much sense to me.

colechristensen 11mo ago
>This idea of constant fresh water being used doesn’t make much sense to me. They're taking advantage of inappropriately priced industrial water. Regardless of if it makes sense, that's what they're doing. Using a lot of cold groundwater and then dumping it. It would be much more expensive to have a closed loop of cooling water (and you're not going to get a lot of cooling on a humid 90 degree Iowa summer day)
- al_borland 11mo ago
  Seems like northern Canada would be a good spot. Plenty of water and cold, and not many people to object to living next door. For most of the year they could just run the pipes outside to cool them down.
  - bryan_w 11mo ago
    >Plenty of water and cold, People say the same thing about Michigan, yet, here we are
    - al_borland 11mo ago
      Averages in a place like Nunavut are below freezing 8 months of the year. Averages in Michigan are only below freezing 1 month of the year (according to wherever Apple Weather pulls their weather averages) The population in Nunavut is 40,000 vs 10M in Michigan, despite Nunavut being 21x larger than Michigan. That ends up being 0.05/sq mi in Nunavut vs 174/sq mi in Michigan. Northern Canada is much colder, has more fresh water, and has drastically lower population density, which should make it easier to find an area where people won't complain (other than environmentalists), and they would be able to better leverage nature for most of the year to help with cooling costs.