I found a lot of value in this article. Out of frustration with people who are alarmist over how much water a datacenter "consumes" compared to households, I've probably erred too often towards:
'People sometimes invoke the idea that water moves through a cycle and never really gets destroyed, in order to suggest that we don’t need to be concerned at all about water use. But while water may not get destroyed, it can get “used up” in the sense that it becomes infeasible or uneconomic to access it.'
Side note, this personal anecdote from the author caught me off guard: "my monthly water bill is roughly 5% of the cost of my monthly electricity bill". I'm in the American southwest (but not arid desert like parts of Arizona/Nevada/Utah), and my monthly water cost averages out annually to ~60% of the cost of electricity. Makes me wonder if my water prices are high, if my electricity prices are low, if my water usage is high or my electricity usage is low.
Biggest alarmist is movement against Nestle using water for bottled water in California. They don’t even use as much as an average golf course.
How much water is wasted on golf courses in these arid regions? Or growing water intensive crops like alfalfa that isn’t even directly used to feed people.
Here in Michigan, my water price is also about 5% of my electric bill. Which is also small, we barely used the AC this summer.
Water billing here is (frustratingly) not progressive: the first thousand gallons costs the same as the tenth or hundredth thousand gallons. It's cheap, we're surrounded by fresh water on the surface and you can stick a well down through 80-100 feet of glacial sand and gravel and get drinkable water basically anywhere.
I was surprised to learn that 70% of my township's municipal water is used by only 15% of the households: basically, those that irrigate their lawns daily.
>I'm in the American southwest (but not arid desert like parts of Arizona/Nevada/Utah)
Doesn’t matter whether you are in the desert or not, only matters if you are in a shared watershed with them. There is huge agricultural demand for water and water rights in those areas which translates to high prices for the areas where they can source water (like your presumably more-watered location)
I think the water-usage stuff regarding data centers is really lacking context in online discourse – and yet, I still believe that freshwater usage really needs to be more of a concern for people, generally. I'm not 'anti-AI' but, I cringe a bit every time someone dismissively says "water cycle" to dismiss concerns around freshwater because, some aquifers are not going to recharge in a meaningful timeframe. That water isn't 'destroyed' – but if a town is tight on water already, it's not necessarily coming back, practically speaking.
I would like to know how much water is taken by a datacenter vs. the same size space of apartments. I can see why it could be considered a bad choice for communities long term if a datacenter takes more.
With no AC and gas hot water, my monthly water bill is ~150% of my electric (that water cost is not including the wastewater that is billed on the water metering).
My water usage is pretty average and my electric usage is apparently hilariously low.
> We can also think about it in economic terms. The 2.5 billion gallons per day required to grow cotton in the US created about six billion pounds of cotton in 2023, worth around $4.5 billion. Data centers, by contrast, are critical infrastructure for technology companies worth many trillions of dollars. Anthropic alone, just one of many AI companies, is already making $5 billion dollars every year selling access to its AI model. A gallon of water used to cool a data center is creating thousands of times more value than if that gallon were used to water a cotton plant.
Clothing is a basic human need, whereas data centres or AI are, well, not.
To reduce this to purely "economical value" is bizarre. This is "only madmen and economists believe in infinite growth" type stuff.
As for the rest, one of the concerns is that it adds demand to an already stressed system that struggle to meet the other needs – many of which are far more critical – especially during droughts. The proverbial straw that overflowed the bucket, so to speak. Stuff like "it's 6% of the water used by US golf courses" is far too broad because in some areas there are no water shortage problems and in others there are.
A huge part of the American economy (to take an example) is information services. Yes, we're also incredibly productive farmers, etc. But, a huuugge part of our wealth as a nation is making 'stuff' that isn't really 'stuff'.
We shouldn’t take these numbers blindly, but even if you think the value that Anthropic is providing is inflated by 10x due to it being a fad, that’s still 100x more value than cotton.
Market prices can be wrong, but I think it goes too far to completely disregard them and cut back on AI rather than cotton in places where there’s relatively little water. You can buy cotton from somewhere that has more water, rather than growing it in a desert.
> A gallon of water used to cool a data center is creating thousands of times more value than if that gallon were used to water a cotton plant.
This completely neglects that the cotton is sold for a profit and Anthropic is doing the equivalent of selling $6B for $5B. Looking at it that way, the water used to grow cotton is producing a lot more value.
"Clothing is a basic human need, whereas data centres or AI are, well, not."
If this was an actual problem, clothing prices would go up and clothing and cotton producers would outspend the AI companies if that's where the demand was. You are anticipating a problem that doesn't exist that the market is the best tool to solve once it were to arise. Prices are a fabulous feedback mechanism. The absence of prices as signals is what made planned economies fail and this was one of the main issues in the Socialist Calculation Debate. Don't try to guess what people want or need! As long as there is no market failure (no competition, natural monopoly, etc), price signals will lead to proper resource allocation.
What a great article. Definitely bookmarking this for reference. People who oppose housing construction often invoke "but what about the water??" as their argument, while the fact is that California cities use less water per capita and overall than they did 50 years ago, almost entirely because of better toilets. The last couple of charts really highlight that trend.
Something else worth considering is that many uses at least in California are non-rivalrous. Reducing one water use does not necessarily create free supply of water for some other use, since water is a physical good that must be transported, refined, stored, and delivered. The best example of this is flood irrigation for rice in northern California. Bad optics, perhaps, but the fact is the rice is grown there because it was flooded in the first place. You can stop growing rice, and that will change one of the cells in your spreadsheet, but only because the spreadsheet model isn't quite right. You can also stop feeding cattle entirely and that isn't going to help cities with chronic supply problems, like Santa Barbara, nor will it benefit large urban systems like San Francisco and EBMUD who rely on dedicated alpine supplies.
> People who oppose housing construction often invoke "but what about the water??" as their argument, while the fact is that California cities use less water per capita and overall than they did 50 years ago, almost entirely because of better toilets.
Those people aren't talking about water use, but all the infrastructure around water. If you take a plot of land that used to be occupied by a couple of single family homes and want to build a multi-story apartment building on it, you need bigger, stronger water supply infrastructure to support all those new sinks. You need bigger, stronger sewage infrastructure to support all the new drains and toilets. Not to mention better electrical infra, different garbage disposal infra, and so on. While I'm generally supportive of "moar housing" you can't just plop the housing down and say job done. You need more of everything else peripheral to and supporting that housing.
> Average per-capita domestic water use in the US is 82 gallons per day. By comparison, German homes use around 33 gallons per person per day, UK homes use around 37 gallons, and French homes use around 39 gallons.
I want to know way more information about these figures... like, are there significant outliers? Drastically different usage profiles?
What they are calling “per capita domestic water use” is the per capita public+self supplied, which is not the same as home use. They sort of hand-wave over “most of this is used at home” but really it is inclusive of not only lawns (which are bigger in the US) but commercial use of water as well- commercial landscaping (far more in the US than in Europe) and other business use
Plumbing fixtures are also more regulated in the EU but I suspect this is a small portion relative to landscaping.
When I worked at a water treatment plant, we produced about 160 million gallons/day of water in the summer time, and only about 80 million gallons/day in the winter time. Now ask yourself what water-consuming activities happen in summer that don't happen in winter.
Primarily, lawns. It's lawns. Most of the international difference in water consumption I would chalk up to lawns, given that the US has much larger average lot sizes and a much larger proportion of detached single-family houses (i.e., houses sitting in the middle of a lawn) than European countries have.
One thing that shocks me as an immigrant from Europe to the US is toilets. I have not seen a single one that has the two buttons, one for pee and one for the other stuff.
Every time I use the toilet it uses 1.6 gallons. 6 liters...
I think in my home country more than 90% of home toilets are the "low water usage one" (with 3 and 6 liters buttons)
And that's only the start, I noticed that people just don't care about water usage over here. People take water from wells with little oversight. In my home country you need a vast amount of bureaucracy to be allowed to take water from aquifers
Maybe there are regs on appliances in Europe, or maybe the prices are high enough that the market demands efficient appliances (like gas/petrol). Whenever I stay in an airbnb in europe, whether it is a fancy place or a cheap apartment, all the appliances look similarly small and water efficient. The washing machine, flushing, hot water heaters, etc. can all add up. To wit, there is no uniform water efficiency requirements in the US.
I recently looked up whether it would be worth it to me to install a water meter instead of paying a flat-rate. Apparently the flat rate is calculated on a consumption of avout half a cubic meter per day. But, without a water meter, I can only guess if my consumption is more or less than that. My guess is that it's considerably less though.
I was curious about the "US Thermal Power Plant Water Use By County" graph which has a very dark square in the SE corner of NC. It's Brunswick County. I guess it's due to the Brunswick Nuclear Generating Station:
> The closest thing the federal government has to a department of water infrastructure, the Bureau of Reclamation, has an annual budget of just $1.1 billion.
One of my favorite books is Cadillac Desert. It's about the damming of the US rivers, the water crisis, and the history of the Bureau.
It may be dwarfed by the other departments, but its had a massive impact on US population development especially in LA.
> From 1902 to 1905, Eaton, Mulholland, and others engaged in underhanded methods to ensure that Los Angeles would gain the water rights in the Owens Valley, blocking the Bureau of Reclamation from building water infrastructure for the residents in Owens Valley.[12]: 48–69 [16]: 62–69 While Eaton engaged in most of the political maneuverings and chicanery,[16]: 62 Mulholland misled Los Angeles public opinion by dramatically understating the amount of water then available for Los Angeles' growth.[16]: 73 Mulholland also misled residents of the Owens Valley; he indicated that Los Angeles would only use unused flows in the Owens Valley, while planning on using the full water rights to fill the aquifer of the San Fernando Valley. [0]
For many years, they piped the entirety of the Owens River to LA, over a hundred miles away and over a mountain range. It is wild that the follies of Los Angeles water management has led to permanent scars in the east side of California from Mono Lake to the Salton Sea disaster.
Potter's analysis of the various consumptive uses of water relies on the USGS survey data of the uses of water, generally a good source. However, there is a small flaw when we try to turn consumptive use into consumption, which is alluded to but not quantified in the USGS report: water losses to evaporation during storage (in reservoirs) and transportation. This is discussed in e.g.:
Much of the literature is preliminary and recommends further study, but the initial estimates indicate that the amount of water that is simply lost from reservoirs is surprisingly large. So I like to yak about covering reservoirs (possibly with solar panels), which won't solve everything, but it has a far larger impact than data centers.
I'm somewhat astonished at the per-capita household use of water per day. I assume it must mostly be for watering lawns?
We have a swimming pool that leaks (we were quoted $125k to fix it since the deck will need replacing, and with interest rates being what they are, borrowing to fix it would be rather painful), and we use only 51gal/person/day at our home. I estimate that if fixing the pool would save another 10.
Lawns use such an incredible amount of water, particularly people maintaining them in deserts, like in Arizona and parts of California. It boggles my mind that people go out of their way to put so much effort and resources just into having grass in front of their house that they mostly don't use.
yeah, our small suburban house in silicon valley can easily use 400 gallons per day on days where we water the small front and back lawns and drip irrigation, but on a non-watering day, we can use as little as 50 gallons for 2 people.
While this is "a lot" of water, when we've had an irrigation leak in a zone that runs for 5 or 10 minutes, the number can balloon to 900 gallons in a day.
The amount of water used by people who actually don't closely monitor and track their usage, with big properties, lots of plants and lawn to irrigate, must be truly mind-boggling. I wouldn't be surprised if tens of thousands of gallons per day was pretty common at a lot of houses.
> Water in the US is generally both widely available and inexpensive: my monthly water bill is roughly 5% of the cost of my monthly electricity bill, and the service is far more reliable.
In my experience with municipal utility districts, the reliability of the water supply is typically not much better than the local power grid. The sewage lift stations seem to have the highest quality generator arrangements.
> In my experience with municipal utility districts, the reliability of the water supply is typically not much better than the local power grid.
Both of these services have been phenomenally reliable everywhere I’ve lived in the United States. The only exception was in a town where we’d get ice storms once a year that would bring trees down on top of power lines, but it was shocking how quickly a truck would show up and fix them all.
I can’t actually think of a time my water has stopped working anywhere except once when the road was torn up and pipes had to be replaced. I wasn’t home, we just got letters explaining when it would happen and how to flush the pipes when it was done.
It's interesting you said that. My experience is the opposite. In my last 10 years in California, I've had power outages a couple times a year (mostly due to storm / trees falling on the electrical lines). But I don't recall a time I got water cut off.
Water in the US is generally both widely available and inexpensive: my monthly water bill is roughly 5% of the cost of my monthly electricity bill, and the service is far more reliable.
Is this the norm for most places in the US?
Where I live our water/sewer bill averages out to a little over $100 a month.
It said 41% of the water used in the US is for thermo electric cooling. Albeit, it didn't break this down into saltwater vs freshwater. It also said the vast majority of this water usage is due to older plants that did not recirculate the water. The newer plants that recirculate the water only used a tiny fraction of water in comparison.
So...if the US replaces all of its old nuclear power plants, we would free up almost 40% of water used today?
Note that water use is not the same as water consumption. If 100 gallons of water passes through a heat exchanger and 99 gallons go back into the river, only then 100 gallons were used but only 1 gallon was consumed. Thermoelectric cooling makes up a lot of water use, but on 1-2% of water consumption because most of the used water is returned: https://watercalculator.org/footprint/water-use-withdrawal-c...
Furthermore, heat exchangers can use wastewater. This is done at the Palo Verde nuclear plant, for example.
Thermoelectric cooling's 41% includes all thermal plants (coal, gas, nuclear), and most of this water is withdrawn but returned to source, not consumed - so modernizing would reduce withdrawals but not free up that water for other consumptive uses.
How did you go from "thermoelectric" to "nuclear"? The US has nearly as much coal power as nuclear power, and significantly more natural gas than nuclear.
Interesting that the infographic (which I thought was exceptionally well-designed, well done USGS) found it necessary to call out that 0 billion gallons/day goes to Mexico. Was this done by previous or this administration I wonder? I do recall reading something about disputes between US and Mexico over abstraction. (Presumably from Rio Grande or similar).
It might be because there used to be a significant flow from the Colorado river into Mexico. But we extract so much that that's gone dry before it reaches the border.
Also, it might be just to show that the other landmass neighboring is not getting anything.
I guess that explains why the water there tastes so nasty. The only places in the US that I ever seek out bottled water are Las Vegas and Phoenix. The water in both places tastes nasty and often comes out of the tap very warm..
> Per Lawrence Berkeley Lab[1], in 2023, data centers used around 48 million gallons of water a day directly for cooling. Most of this water will evaporate as part of the cooling process[2], and is thus consumed.
I'm from the Netherlands. The last few years there have been issues with ground water levels dropping and a lack of rainfall. To the point where water companies are asking consumers to reduce their water use for e.g. irrigating their gardens, shower less long, etc.
Of course, the notion of a water shortage in a country where two of the largest rivers in Europe empty in the North Sea and that keeps about a third of it's land that lies below sea levels dry by actively pumping relatively clean water out is a bit of a weird notion to sell. We have a surplus of water, not a shortage. Rivers overflowing their dikes is an issue we deal with regularly. And a lot of infrastructure to dump that into the North Sea by the millions of liters per day.
The issue isn't that there isn't more clean water than we can handle but that more water gets taken from limited ground water reserves than is added back naturally. This would be a non-issue if we'd mostly use surface water instead.
Most of this ground water isn't even used by consumers but by agriculture. And worse, farmers also work very hard to keep their land dry after irrigating it because they need the ground to be moist, not soaking wet as in a swamp. The water that they drain is very high in nutrients because they are using a lot of fertilizer too. So, basically, agriculture is in the business of taking rain water that dumps on their land and surrounding lands and basically dumping it into rivers without even using it for irrigation. But then when it doesn't rain, they use ground water to irrigate, which then drains into rivers. As a result, nature is suffering because ground water levels are dropping and because surface water is polluted. Ground water is also used for consumers.
The solution is of course to use slightly more expensive to use water from e.g. surface water or rain water (which is generally drained to get rid of it ASAP). Of course a lot of that water isn't as easy to access everywhere so it requires infrastructure (pipes) or storage (reservoirs). But historically, ground water was there and relatively clean (so it can be used without much processing) and people just use it without thinking about it. Most people with gardens don't even capture the water that falls on their roofs, which on an annual basis should be plenty to water their gardens. Neither are they (re)using grey water or rain water for e.g. flushing their toilets. All of that is done using tap water that comes from ground water.
This isn't a shortage crisis but a water abuse crisis. The solution is being a bit smarter about what water we use for which purpose. And a lot of that is rethinking intensive agriculture. We grow crops to feed cattle that produces so much manure that we have severe nitrogen pollution getting in the way of economic growth because we have to limit construction in/near polluted areas. Those crops uses ground water and feed the cattle. The problems are connected.
The reason we have water "issues" in California is due to a complicated system of water rights, where more "senior" and upstream water rights-holders can take as much as they want.
Of course, if we nullified that system, we'd have a new problem; lack of agriculture.
With the rise in climate change and _collective inaction_. We are in a trajectory for mass extinction [1].
With the second AI gold rush coming to a near abrupt stop, political climates worsening, billionaires continuing to loot the collective populace through their pawns in the kakistocracy (USA) and kleptocracy (Russia). We are absolutely cooked.
What’s the point anymore? What are we even solving? Being a _good_ person is no longer worth any value. Just exploit and climb over each other like crabs in barrel.
It's true that we were all sold the lie of individual actions being the way to solve the climate crisis (recycling, turning off lights, etc.) But I think the conclusion is to try other strategies rather than giving up when the first strategy didn't work.
The whole debate is retarded and only real because we try to shut down our power plants so we can’t have large scale desalination. When I was younger I hoped that all these degrowthers would just age out. But it turns out young people keep filling in the ranks.
The interesting thing is watching as they all complain about the consequences of stifling growth without realizing that’s what’s happening.
“I don’t want any more housing here. It’s too expensive”
Totally retarded but fortunately I’ve figured out my way around this stuff.
newfocogi|6 months ago
'People sometimes invoke the idea that water moves through a cycle and never really gets destroyed, in order to suggest that we don’t need to be concerned at all about water use. But while water may not get destroyed, it can get “used up” in the sense that it becomes infeasible or uneconomic to access it.'
Side note, this personal anecdote from the author caught me off guard: "my monthly water bill is roughly 5% of the cost of my monthly electricity bill". I'm in the American southwest (but not arid desert like parts of Arizona/Nevada/Utah), and my monthly water cost averages out annually to ~60% of the cost of electricity. Makes me wonder if my water prices are high, if my electricity prices are low, if my water usage is high or my electricity usage is low.
adrr|6 months ago
How much water is wasted on golf courses in these arid regions? Or growing water intensive crops like alfalfa that isn’t even directly used to feed people.
LeifCarrotson|6 months ago
Water billing here is (frustratingly) not progressive: the first thousand gallons costs the same as the tenth or hundredth thousand gallons. It's cheap, we're surrounded by fresh water on the surface and you can stick a well down through 80-100 feet of glacial sand and gravel and get drinkable water basically anywhere.
I was surprised to learn that 70% of my township's municipal water is used by only 15% of the households: basically, those that irrigate their lawns daily.
hammock|6 months ago
Doesn’t matter whether you are in the desert or not, only matters if you are in a shared watershed with them. There is huge agricultural demand for water and water rights in those areas which translates to high prices for the areas where they can source water (like your presumably more-watered location)
gdubs|6 months ago
password4321|6 months ago
maxerickson|6 months ago
My water usage is pretty average and my electric usage is apparently hilariously low.
abullinan|6 months ago
pluto_modadic|6 months ago
testing22321|6 months ago
You’re paying money and using resources and you’ve never looked into the details?
Living in Australia where both are expensive and very finite it’s a must.
arp242|6 months ago
Clothing is a basic human need, whereas data centres or AI are, well, not.
To reduce this to purely "economical value" is bizarre. This is "only madmen and economists believe in infinite growth" type stuff.
As for the rest, one of the concerns is that it adds demand to an already stressed system that struggle to meet the other needs – many of which are far more critical – especially during droughts. The proverbial straw that overflowed the bucket, so to speak. Stuff like "it's 6% of the water used by US golf courses" is far too broad because in some areas there are no water shortage problems and in others there are.
gdubs|6 months ago
skybrian|6 months ago
Market prices can be wrong, but I think it goes too far to completely disregard them and cut back on AI rather than cotton in places where there’s relatively little water. You can buy cotton from somewhere that has more water, rather than growing it in a desert.
xienze|6 months ago
This completely neglects that the cotton is sold for a profit and Anthropic is doing the equivalent of selling $6B for $5B. Looking at it that way, the water used to grow cotton is producing a lot more value.
alright2565|6 months ago
ajmurmann|6 months ago
If this was an actual problem, clothing prices would go up and clothing and cotton producers would outspend the AI companies if that's where the demand was. You are anticipating a problem that doesn't exist that the market is the best tool to solve once it were to arise. Prices are a fabulous feedback mechanism. The absence of prices as signals is what made planned economies fail and this was one of the main issues in the Socialist Calculation Debate. Don't try to guess what people want or need! As long as there is no market failure (no competition, natural monopoly, etc), price signals will lead to proper resource allocation.
dexterdog|6 months ago
mritterhoff|6 months ago
jeffbee|6 months ago
Something else worth considering is that many uses at least in California are non-rivalrous. Reducing one water use does not necessarily create free supply of water for some other use, since water is a physical good that must be transported, refined, stored, and delivered. The best example of this is flood irrigation for rice in northern California. Bad optics, perhaps, but the fact is the rice is grown there because it was flooded in the first place. You can stop growing rice, and that will change one of the cells in your spreadsheet, but only because the spreadsheet model isn't quite right. You can also stop feeding cattle entirely and that isn't going to help cities with chronic supply problems, like Santa Barbara, nor will it benefit large urban systems like San Francisco and EBMUD who rely on dedicated alpine supplies.
ryandrake|6 months ago
Those people aren't talking about water use, but all the infrastructure around water. If you take a plot of land that used to be occupied by a couple of single family homes and want to build a multi-story apartment building on it, you need bigger, stronger water supply infrastructure to support all those new sinks. You need bigger, stronger sewage infrastructure to support all the new drains and toilets. Not to mention better electrical infra, different garbage disposal infra, and so on. While I'm generally supportive of "moar housing" you can't just plop the housing down and say job done. You need more of everything else peripheral to and supporting that housing.
lxe|6 months ago
I want to know way more information about these figures... like, are there significant outliers? Drastically different usage profiles?
hammock|6 months ago
Plumbing fixtures are also more regulated in the EU but I suspect this is a small portion relative to landscaping.
jcranmer|6 months ago
Primarily, lawns. It's lawns. Most of the international difference in water consumption I would chalk up to lawns, given that the US has much larger average lot sizes and a much larger proportion of detached single-family houses (i.e., houses sitting in the middle of a lawn) than European countries have.
gonzalohm|6 months ago
Every time I use the toilet it uses 1.6 gallons. 6 liters...
I think in my home country more than 90% of home toilets are the "low water usage one" (with 3 and 6 liters buttons)
And that's only the start, I noticed that people just don't care about water usage over here. People take water from wells with little oversight. In my home country you need a vast amount of bureaucracy to be allowed to take water from aquifers
dfxm12|6 months ago
widforss|6 months ago
dlcarrier|6 months ago
All this does is reflect that Germany imports agriculture, while the US exports it.
testing22321|6 months ago
js2|6 months ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunswick_Nuclear_Generating_S...
The water supply in Brunswick County is terribly polluted by PFAS (courtesy of DuPont, not the power plant):
https://www.nrdc.org/stories/drinking-water-crisis-north-car...
jackconsidine|6 months ago
One of my favorite books is Cadillac Desert. It's about the damming of the US rivers, the water crisis, and the history of the Bureau.
It may be dwarfed by the other departments, but its had a massive impact on US population development especially in LA.
> From 1902 to 1905, Eaton, Mulholland, and others engaged in underhanded methods to ensure that Los Angeles would gain the water rights in the Owens Valley, blocking the Bureau of Reclamation from building water infrastructure for the residents in Owens Valley.[12]: 48–69 [16]: 62–69 While Eaton engaged in most of the political maneuverings and chicanery,[16]: 62 Mulholland misled Los Angeles public opinion by dramatically understating the amount of water then available for Los Angeles' growth.[16]: 73 Mulholland also misled residents of the Owens Valley; he indicated that Los Angeles would only use unused flows in the Owens Valley, while planning on using the full water rights to fill the aquifer of the San Fernando Valley. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Mulholland
This is the Mulholland of Mulholland Drive who was a major character in CD
blackguardx|6 months ago
scythe|6 months ago
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/99/1/bams-d-...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00344... (translation: 33.73e9 m^3/yr ≈ 24400 Mgal/day, roughly corn + alfalfa + steel)
Much of the literature is preliminary and recommends further study, but the initial estimates indicate that the amount of water that is simply lost from reservoirs is surprisingly large. So I like to yak about covering reservoirs (possibly with solar panels), which won't solve everything, but it has a far larger impact than data centers.
Aside: metric, please!
aidenn0|6 months ago
We have a swimming pool that leaks (we were quoted $125k to fix it since the deck will need replacing, and with interest rates being what they are, borrowing to fix it would be rather painful), and we use only 51gal/person/day at our home. I estimate that if fixing the pool would save another 10.
hearsathought|6 months ago
I'd assume so. Would be interesting to see the water usage comparison between city dwellers and suburbanites.
morleytj|6 months ago
FuriouslyAdrift|6 months ago
rconti|6 months ago
While this is "a lot" of water, when we've had an irrigation leak in a zone that runs for 5 or 10 minutes, the number can balloon to 900 gallons in a day.
The amount of water used by people who actually don't closely monitor and track their usage, with big properties, lots of plants and lawn to irrigate, must be truly mind-boggling. I wouldn't be surprised if tens of thousands of gallons per day was pretty common at a lot of houses.
bob1029|6 months ago
In my experience with municipal utility districts, the reliability of the water supply is typically not much better than the local power grid. The sewage lift stations seem to have the highest quality generator arrangements.
Aurornis|6 months ago
Both of these services have been phenomenally reliable everywhere I’ve lived in the United States. The only exception was in a town where we’d get ice storms once a year that would bring trees down on top of power lines, but it was shocking how quickly a truck would show up and fix them all.
I can’t actually think of a time my water has stopped working anywhere except once when the road was torn up and pipes had to be replaced. I wasn’t home, we just got letters explaining when it would happen and how to flush the pipes when it was done.
thanhhaimai|6 months ago
Goronmon|6 months ago
Is this the norm for most places in the US?
Where I live our water/sewer bill averages out to a little over $100 a month.
evantbyrne|6 months ago
bcrosby95|6 months ago
recallingmemory|6 months ago
rawgabbit|6 months ago
So...if the US replaces all of its old nuclear power plants, we would free up almost 40% of water used today?
Manuel_D|6 months ago
Furthermore, heat exchangers can use wastewater. This is done at the Palo Verde nuclear plant, for example.
ethan_smith|6 months ago
gpm|6 months ago
JumpCrisscross|6 months ago
FTFA: “thermoelectric power plants — plants that use heat to produce steam to drive a turbine.”
dbuxton|6 months ago
hvb2|6 months ago
Also, it might be just to show that the other landmass neighboring is not getting anything.
TMWNN|6 months ago
drewg123|6 months ago
adrr|6 months ago
eweise|6 months ago
I say that's a darn good use of water. Fore!
MeteorMarc|6 months ago
matt_kantor|6 months ago
> Per Lawrence Berkeley Lab[1], in 2023, data centers used around 48 million gallons of water a day directly for cooling. Most of this water will evaporate as part of the cooling process[2], and is thus consumed.
[1]: https://eta-publications.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12...
[2]: https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/04/how_datacenters_use_w...
unknown|6 months ago
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unknown|6 months ago
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jillesvangurp|6 months ago
Of course, the notion of a water shortage in a country where two of the largest rivers in Europe empty in the North Sea and that keeps about a third of it's land that lies below sea levels dry by actively pumping relatively clean water out is a bit of a weird notion to sell. We have a surplus of water, not a shortage. Rivers overflowing their dikes is an issue we deal with regularly. And a lot of infrastructure to dump that into the North Sea by the millions of liters per day.
The issue isn't that there isn't more clean water than we can handle but that more water gets taken from limited ground water reserves than is added back naturally. This would be a non-issue if we'd mostly use surface water instead.
Most of this ground water isn't even used by consumers but by agriculture. And worse, farmers also work very hard to keep their land dry after irrigating it because they need the ground to be moist, not soaking wet as in a swamp. The water that they drain is very high in nutrients because they are using a lot of fertilizer too. So, basically, agriculture is in the business of taking rain water that dumps on their land and surrounding lands and basically dumping it into rivers without even using it for irrigation. But then when it doesn't rain, they use ground water to irrigate, which then drains into rivers. As a result, nature is suffering because ground water levels are dropping and because surface water is polluted. Ground water is also used for consumers.
The solution is of course to use slightly more expensive to use water from e.g. surface water or rain water (which is generally drained to get rid of it ASAP). Of course a lot of that water isn't as easy to access everywhere so it requires infrastructure (pipes) or storage (reservoirs). But historically, ground water was there and relatively clean (so it can be used without much processing) and people just use it without thinking about it. Most people with gardens don't even capture the water that falls on their roofs, which on an annual basis should be plenty to water their gardens. Neither are they (re)using grey water or rain water for e.g. flushing their toilets. All of that is done using tap water that comes from ground water.
This isn't a shortage crisis but a water abuse crisis. The solution is being a bit smarter about what water we use for which purpose. And a lot of that is rethinking intensive agriculture. We grow crops to feed cattle that produces so much manure that we have severe nitrogen pollution getting in the way of economic growth because we have to limit construction in/near polluted areas. Those crops uses ground water and feed the cattle. The problems are connected.
rconti|6 months ago
Of course, if we nullified that system, we'd have a new problem; lack of agriculture.
ihaveajob|6 months ago
xyst|6 months ago
With the second AI gold rush coming to a near abrupt stop, political climates worsening, billionaires continuing to loot the collective populace through their pawns in the kakistocracy (USA) and kleptocracy (Russia). We are absolutely cooked.
What’s the point anymore? What are we even solving? Being a _good_ person is no longer worth any value. Just exploit and climb over each other like crabs in barrel.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/09/1...
cyrnel|6 months ago
xienze|6 months ago
Birth rates are below replacement nearly everywhere. That’s going to cause extinction far sooner than climate change will.
renewiltord|6 months ago
The interesting thing is watching as they all complain about the consequences of stifling growth without realizing that’s what’s happening.
“I don’t want any more housing here. It’s too expensive”
Totally retarded but fortunately I’ve figured out my way around this stuff.