11 ms·

> Using the prompt, “How much water is likely to evaporate from data centers in California per year, assuming they are all using mostly evaporative cooling?” se

> Using the prompt, “How much water is likely to evaporate from data centers in California per year, assuming they are all using mostly evaporative cooling?” several free AI websites provided ranges of estimates, below. These AI also can provide ranges and sources for calculation assumptions. Data centers with closed loop cooling systems are absolutely built all of the time. Total evaporative cooling has the advantage of being more power efficient (and therefor cheaper) - the only reason they bother with total evap is because the water is being offered plentifully and cheap. People have no reality of how cheaply priced industrial water is in this country. My parents had a cherry orchard and their annual water bill was $100 an acre per year for as much as they wanted. Which is why the water consumption for data centers is only still a fraction of what we lose to evaporation from inefficient spray irrigation.

kitsune1 6mo ago
[dead]
da_chicken 6mo ago
Yeah, there are alfalfa fields in central Arizona. Alfalfa basically turns water and sunlight into cellulose about as quickly as plants can. Worse, the owners of those fields are often foreign companies. That means they use tremendous amounts of water in one of the driest regions on earth, in the middle of a multiple decade drought, and the wealth these farms generate disappears overseas.
- laxmena 6mo ago
  [flagged]
- somewhatgoated 6mo ago
  How is it legal? Shouldn’t water be the most regulated (as in protected) substance of all?
  - xvedejas 6mo ago
    It's quite regulated in the western US, but usually in the direction of guaranteeing water to incumbent landowners. Some people end up with really strong water rights, and they can be wasteful if the law helps them do so.
    - tesseract 6mo ago
      And are often _encouraged_ to be wasteful by "use it or lose it" type provisions.
    - FireBeyond 6mo ago
      A big celebrity, I think one of the Kardashians was a couple of years ago fined and forced to update things when the city found that the big fountain in the front of the home had no recycling or such, but was effectively just an open faucet because I guess keeping it algae free was proving a hassle.
  - jerlam 6mo ago
    I don't know the exact situation described above, but water rights are often linked to property rights, and those are regularly treated as sacred. It doesn't matter if the owners are foreigners and the law is outdated. And those with land often have more money and power than the small government with jurisdiction, assuming the lobbyists haven't taken control of the latter.
    - wahern 6mo ago
      > and those are regularly treated as sacred They indeed are treated as sacred, it's enshrined in the Takings Clause of the US Constitution. The big problem in the American West it that the model of property rights in water sources makes it very difficult as a technical matter to put a price on a specific claim and to adjudicate disputes, without triggering a cascade of pricing and rights dilemmas upstream and downstream (figuratively and literally). Western states could in theory exercise eminent domain to take back water rights, and I think they occasionally do, but it's just very fraught from countless legal angles even before getting into the politics of it, which compound the headaches a hundredfold (partly because of the interdependent nature of everybody's rights). Most of the time Western states try to hack around the issues with complicated regulatory and taxing schemes to try to claw back some semblance of control over water resources. But it's very inefficient and ineffective. Property rights are useful because you don't need to centralize all pricing and usage decisions, or when you do--e.g. regulation, taxation, eminent domain--the mechanisms for applying those decisions are simpler and more mechanical; but Western water rights are just a different kind of beast. What's needed is comprehensive reform that tries to shift the American West to a better water rights model, specifically a better model for how property rights inhere in water resources, to drastically improve transactional efficiency, both from a legal and market perspective. But there's no simple way, and in particular no cheap way from a budgetary perspective, to get there even if the motivation existed to get around the monumental collective action problem, which it doesn't.
- JoshTriplett 6mo ago
  Part of the issue is not systematically using a pricing structure that charges disproportionately more for usage above high thresholds. The 101-level "solution" is to just raise the price to account for demand. The problem with that is that it treats all usage the same, whether it's a residence's first gallon or an alfalfa field's last gallon. But the former is something we need to protect. It makes sense to price water, and electricity, in a fashion where the first X costs a certain amount, and the next X has a higher rate, and above some percentile of usage it has a much higher rate, and at some percentile of usage, customers should be very nearly paying for new required utility infrastructure themselves. That allows using pricing to solve supply problems, without penalizing normal levels of usage. Some utilities already do this. But if there are actual issues with having enough supply for both datacenters/farms/smelters/etc and residential usage, then they're not doing this well enough, or don't have the pricing correct.
  - jlebar 6mo ago
    > Part of the issue is not systematically using a pricing structure that charges disproportionately more for usage above high thresholds. We don't do this for gasoline (in most countries), even though it is also vital for life. And yet people can still drive, afford to eat food grown with fertilizers, use plastic, and so on. Turns out markets are pretty good when you leave them alone. But when they're not left alone (as is the case with water today!!) you get some weird shit.
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
    - da_chicken 6mo ago
      > We don't do this for gasoline No, but commercial trucks use diesel, which carries about 25% higher taxes per gallon. And vehicle registration on semi-trailer trucks is significantly higher as well. They pay, on average, between $25,000 and $30,000 in taxes and fees each year. > Turns out markets are pretty good when you leave them alone. No, they aren't. They're ridiculously bad when you leave them alone because someone captures the market, ramps up anti-competitive practices, and immediately begins rent-seeking as hard as possible. Free markets are pretty good at finding good prices. Markets that are left alone do not remain free. That lauded "self-interest" encourages businesses that have reached nearly 100% market share to increase profit in other ways.
- kazinator 6mo ago
  But at least that alfalfa gobbles up CO2 from the air.
  - malfist 6mo ago
    Until people/animals eat it, or it decomposes. Not saying this like we should ignore the co2 impact from data centers, but biomass is a pretty poor co2 absorber unless its cyano and falls to the ocean floor before decomposing
    - thaumasiotes 6mo ago
      > Until people/animals eat it, or it decomposes. Well, if you want to think about it that way (perfectly reasonable), you'd also want to consider the production of new alfalfa. Figure that at any given time, the world contains X amount of alfalfa, and that amount determines how much carbon is absorbed by the alfalfa industry.
      - malfist 6mo ago
        I'm not sure any carbon is absorbed even by this metric. Unless were growing alfalfa and sequestering it below ground. You should probably also consider inputs to growing that alfalfa too. Even single order inputs like transportation, fertilizer, water, etc would likely have more carbon release than the carbon mass of the alfalfa. Is alfalfa even one of the plants that will nitrogen fix from the air? Or is it all pulled from the growing medium?
  - thelastgallon 6mo ago
    Goes into cow, comes out as methane. cow dies/meat --> co2. All the fossil fuel transportation for alfalfa to cow to brisket --> co2. Lot more co2 generated than absorbed.
    - kazinator 6mo ago
      But burning fossil fuels makes water, and also CO2 for the plants. The white, visible part of what you see coming out of a tail pipe is water vapor. The main thing is, we are not making any new carbon that was not already here billions of years ago. :)
- themafia 6mo ago
  > are often foreign companies That have _themselves_ banned Alfalfa farming; because, of the water impact.
- ChadNauseam 6mo ago
  I think it’s a good thing when non-americans want to invest in businesses that operate in america. They’ll use that investment to hire americans and produce goods that are sold to americans. I’m sure american capitalists would love to be the only ones allowed to invest here, as they would be able to get more equity for their capital, but it’s not good for anyone else and not really even good for them long term. Smart countries try to attract foreign investment, not scare it away
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
- cameldrv 6mo ago
  My understanding is, that at least in California the Alfalfa itself is often also exported to Gulf countries that are too dry for pasture or growing feed, but they want to raise cattle. Alfalfa really is almost like dehydrated water like aluminum is solid electricity. Of course, the farmers pay almost nothing for the absolutely gigantic amounts of water, and meanwhile they pester me to use a low flow shower head and charge me $400/month for a few gallons.
- expedition32 6mo ago
  Those fields still provide more jobs for the locals than data centers. People need to work and not everyone can be a tech bro keyboard warrior. Hell apparently the end game is to replace IT workers with AI!
- xnx 6mo ago
  Middle east countries excel at selling irreplaceable liquids they pump out of the ground for free.
rsoto2 6mo ago
[flagged]
rsoto2 6mo ago
Also just because something is cheap doesn't mean it's not depleting resources and making life worse for a community somewhere. People are constantly trying to build pipelines to the west to deplete the great lakes. There is a societal and ecological limit and these AI companies are not worth it.
kstrauser 6mo ago
> People have no reality of how cheaply priced industrial water is in this country. Driving between SF and LA, you see a gazillion signs from water leeches complaining that the government won't give them yet more nearly-free water. No, I don't want to go without fresh crops. But yes, I absolutely believe that, say, growing almonds in basically a desert should be a financially expensive operation, and if that makes the end result more expensive, then so be it. And if that means it's no longer viable to empty rivers for the sake of a tasty bag of snack nuts, I can learn to live with it.
- munk-a 6mo ago
  This is a really awkward situation because while we'd really want the market to sort of auto-balance the costs between different suppliers it's also really hard to look at PE ratios right now and believe that the market is anywhere near sane. OpenAI could trivially monopolize the water supply in CA[1] with its current warchest and that would, for everyone, be terrible in some fundamentally obvious ways - so we've clearly got a pretty gigantic misalignment in the market which means we're reliant on the government specifically picking winners but ideally doing so in a sensible manner. How many well cooked dinners is a prompt worth? Not nearly as many as the market currently says. If it were anything less vital we could probably just ride it out until the bubble bursts but if acceleration continues then in time water usage might actually rise to the levels that the most fear mongering folks are saying it's at. 1. Accidentally even - without even reaching into the realm of malicious intent.
- cybercatgurrl 6mo ago
  exactly! LA is peak capitalism over the environment. the amount of ecosystems destroyed by Los Angeles’s insatiable thirst for water is impressive
  - kstrauser 6mo ago
    These aren't in LA.
  - neuronexmachina 6mo ago
    LA's water usage is dwarfed by the agricultural water usage in the Central Valley: https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/ https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/
aaron695 6mo ago
[dead]
silexia 6mo ago
[flagged]
jrm4 6mo ago
Not even industrial, I remember someone asking, what's the heaviest thing you can buy per dollar. And someone ran the math, somewhere it's like $20 for a full swimming pool on the expensive side.

kitsune1 6mo ago

[dead]

da_chicken 6mo ago

Yeah, there are alfalfa fields in central Arizona. Alfalfa basically turns water and sunlight into cellulose about as quickly as plants can. Worse, the owners of those fields are often foreign companies. That means they use tremendous amounts of water in one of the driest regions on earth, in the middle of a multiple decade drought, and the wealth these farms generate disappears overseas.

laxmena 6mo ago
[flagged]
somewhatgoated 6mo ago
How is it legal? Shouldn’t water be the most regulated (as in protected) substance of all?
- xvedejas 6mo ago
  It's quite regulated in the western US, but usually in the direction of guaranteeing water to incumbent landowners. Some people end up with really strong water rights, and they can be wasteful if the law helps them do so.
  - tesseract 6mo ago
    And are often _encouraged_ to be wasteful by "use it or lose it" type provisions.
  - FireBeyond 6mo ago
    A big celebrity, I think one of the Kardashians was a couple of years ago fined and forced to update things when the city found that the big fountain in the front of the home had no recycling or such, but was effectively just an open faucet because I guess keeping it algae free was proving a hassle.
- jerlam 6mo ago
  I don't know the exact situation described above, but water rights are often linked to property rights, and those are regularly treated as sacred. It doesn't matter if the owners are foreigners and the law is outdated. And those with land often have more money and power than the small government with jurisdiction, assuming the lobbyists haven't taken control of the latter.
  - wahern 6mo ago
    > and those are regularly treated as sacred They indeed are treated as sacred, it's enshrined in the Takings Clause of the US Constitution. The big problem in the American West it that the model of property rights in water sources makes it very difficult as a technical matter to put a price on a specific claim and to adjudicate disputes, without triggering a cascade of pricing and rights dilemmas upstream and downstream (figuratively and literally). Western states could in theory exercise eminent domain to take back water rights, and I think they occasionally do, but it's just very fraught from countless legal angles even before getting into the politics of it, which compound the headaches a hundredfold (partly because of the interdependent nature of everybody's rights). Most of the time Western states try to hack around the issues with complicated regulatory and taxing schemes to try to claw back some semblance of control over water resources. But it's very inefficient and ineffective. Property rights are useful because you don't need to centralize all pricing and usage decisions, or when you do--e.g. regulation, taxation, eminent domain--the mechanisms for applying those decisions are simpler and more mechanical; but Western water rights are just a different kind of beast. What's needed is comprehensive reform that tries to shift the American West to a better water rights model, specifically a better model for how property rights inhere in water resources, to drastically improve transactional efficiency, both from a legal and market perspective. But there's no simple way, and in particular no cheap way from a budgetary perspective, to get there even if the motivation existed to get around the monumental collective action problem, which it doesn't.
JoshTriplett 6mo ago
Part of the issue is not systematically using a pricing structure that charges disproportionately more for usage above high thresholds. The 101-level "solution" is to just raise the price to account for demand. The problem with that is that it treats all usage the same, whether it's a residence's first gallon or an alfalfa field's last gallon. But the former is something we need to protect. It makes sense to price water, and electricity, in a fashion where the first X costs a certain amount, and the next X has a higher rate, and above some percentile of usage it has a much higher rate, and at some percentile of usage, customers should be very nearly paying for new required utility infrastructure themselves. That allows using pricing to solve supply problems, without penalizing normal levels of usage. Some utilities already do this. But if there are actual issues with having enough supply for both datacenters/farms/smelters/etc and residential usage, then they're not doing this well enough, or don't have the pricing correct.
- jlebar 6mo ago
  > Part of the issue is not systematically using a pricing structure that charges disproportionately more for usage above high thresholds. We don't do this for gasoline (in most countries), even though it is also vital for life. And yet people can still drive, afford to eat food grown with fertilizers, use plastic, and so on. Turns out markets are pretty good when you leave them alone. But when they're not left alone (as is the case with water today!!) you get some weird shit.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - da_chicken 6mo ago
    > We don't do this for gasoline No, but commercial trucks use diesel, which carries about 25% higher taxes per gallon. And vehicle registration on semi-trailer trucks is significantly higher as well. They pay, on average, between $25,000 and $30,000 in taxes and fees each year. > Turns out markets are pretty good when you leave them alone. No, they aren't. They're ridiculously bad when you leave them alone because someone captures the market, ramps up anti-competitive practices, and immediately begins rent-seeking as hard as possible. Free markets are pretty good at finding good prices. Markets that are left alone do not remain free. That lauded "self-interest" encourages businesses that have reached nearly 100% market share to increase profit in other ways.
kazinator 6mo ago
But at least that alfalfa gobbles up CO2 from the air.
- malfist 6mo ago
  Until people/animals eat it, or it decomposes. Not saying this like we should ignore the co2 impact from data centers, but biomass is a pretty poor co2 absorber unless its cyano and falls to the ocean floor before decomposing
  - thaumasiotes 6mo ago
    > Until people/animals eat it, or it decomposes. Well, if you want to think about it that way (perfectly reasonable), you'd also want to consider the production of new alfalfa. Figure that at any given time, the world contains X amount of alfalfa, and that amount determines how much carbon is absorbed by the alfalfa industry.
    - malfist 6mo ago
      I'm not sure any carbon is absorbed even by this metric. Unless were growing alfalfa and sequestering it below ground. You should probably also consider inputs to growing that alfalfa too. Even single order inputs like transportation, fertilizer, water, etc would likely have more carbon release than the carbon mass of the alfalfa. Is alfalfa even one of the plants that will nitrogen fix from the air? Or is it all pulled from the growing medium?
- thelastgallon 6mo ago
  Goes into cow, comes out as methane. cow dies/meat --> co2. All the fossil fuel transportation for alfalfa to cow to brisket --> co2. Lot more co2 generated than absorbed.
  - kazinator 6mo ago
    But burning fossil fuels makes water, and also CO2 for the plants. The white, visible part of what you see coming out of a tail pipe is water vapor. The main thing is, we are not making any new carbon that was not already here billions of years ago. :)
themafia 6mo ago
> are often foreign companies That have _themselves_ banned Alfalfa farming; because, of the water impact.
ChadNauseam 6mo ago
I think it’s a good thing when non-americans want to invest in businesses that operate in america. They’ll use that investment to hire americans and produce goods that are sold to americans. I’m sure american capitalists would love to be the only ones allowed to invest here, as they would be able to get more equity for their capital, but it’s not good for anyone else and not really even good for them long term. Smart countries try to attract foreign investment, not scare it away
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
cameldrv 6mo ago
My understanding is, that at least in California the Alfalfa itself is often also exported to Gulf countries that are too dry for pasture or growing feed, but they want to raise cattle. Alfalfa really is almost like dehydrated water like aluminum is solid electricity. Of course, the farmers pay almost nothing for the absolutely gigantic amounts of water, and meanwhile they pester me to use a low flow shower head and charge me $400/month for a few gallons.
expedition32 6mo ago
Those fields still provide more jobs for the locals than data centers. People need to work and not everyone can be a tech bro keyboard warrior. Hell apparently the end game is to replace IT workers with AI!
xnx 6mo ago
Middle east countries excel at selling irreplaceable liquids they pump out of the ground for free.

rsoto2 6mo ago

[flagged]

rsoto2 6mo ago

Also just because something is cheap doesn't mean it's not depleting resources and making life worse for a community somewhere. People are constantly trying to build pipelines to the west to deplete the great lakes. There is a societal and ecological limit and these AI companies are not worth it.

kstrauser 6mo ago

> People have no reality of how cheaply priced industrial water is in this country. Driving between SF and LA, you see a gazillion signs from water leeches complaining that the government won't give them yet more nearly-free water. No, I don't want to go without fresh crops. But yes, I absolutely believe that, say, growing almonds in basically a desert should be a financially expensive operation, and if that makes the end result more expensive, then so be it. And if that means it's no longer viable to empty rivers for the sake of a tasty bag of snack nuts, I can learn to live with it.

munk-a 6mo ago
This is a really awkward situation because while we'd really want the market to sort of auto-balance the costs between different suppliers it's also really hard to look at PE ratios right now and believe that the market is anywhere near sane. OpenAI could trivially monopolize the water supply in CA[1] with its current warchest and that would, for everyone, be terrible in some fundamentally obvious ways - so we've clearly got a pretty gigantic misalignment in the market which means we're reliant on the government specifically picking winners but ideally doing so in a sensible manner. How many well cooked dinners is a prompt worth? Not nearly as many as the market currently says. If it were anything less vital we could probably just ride it out until the bubble bursts but if acceleration continues then in time water usage might actually rise to the levels that the most fear mongering folks are saying it's at. 1. Accidentally even - without even reaching into the realm of malicious intent.
cybercatgurrl 6mo ago
exactly! LA is peak capitalism over the environment. the amount of ecosystems destroyed by Los Angeles’s insatiable thirst for water is impressive
- kstrauser 6mo ago
  These aren't in LA.
- neuronexmachina 6mo ago
  LA's water usage is dwarfed by the agricultural water usage in the Central Valley: https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/ https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/

aaron695 6mo ago

[dead]

silexia 6mo ago

[flagged]

jrm4 6mo ago

Not even industrial, I remember someone asking, what's the heaviest thing you can buy per dollar. And someone ran the math, somewhere it's like $20 for a full swimming pool on the expensive side.