Thread

Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage

356 points · 458 comments · sensanaty

tptacek · 1791145040 · focus · HN ↗
So, basically, not a meaningful amount of water at all. Credit to the story authors for taking the time to frame what 13MM gallons actually works out to.
1. mrb · 1791146490 · focus · HN ↗
  Yes. As another comparison point, 13 million gallons per year amounts to 24 gallons per minute which is about 5 (five) bathtub faucets running 24/7/365.
  The water bill alone would be only $100k/yr assuming average US domestic rate of $8 per 1000 gallons.
  1. bix6 · 1791148781 · focus · HN ↗
    Remind me median income?
    creato · 1791151630 · focus · HN ↗
    Remind me who leaves 8 bath tub faucets running 24/7/365?
    bix6 · 1791154097 · focus · HN ↗
    Me?
    Dylan16807 · 1791153645 · focus · HN ↗
    $87k household. So that's 6 median incomes of water being used up by that datacenter. Put that way it doesn't sound bad, especially when you glance at the electric bill.
    Also when it evaporates instead of going to the sewer that drops the price in half.
    Edit: Oops I got that mixed up and was treating it like a per-faucet cost. So actually it's one full household income converted into water to handle the entire facility.
    bix6 · 1791154071 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah I’m sure someone on median income feels the same
    Dylan16807 · 1791154461 · focus · HN ↗
    Probably, yeah.
    Do you think people look at big facilities and calculate that they're spending whatever times the medium wage on a crucial service and get mad about it?
    Converting things into median wages is a way to put them into scale. They spent this many wages for construction, they spend this many on supplies, they sell this many in product, they hire this many people to work there. If anyone thinks its bad for anything a company buys to exceed a median wage, that's a very silly expectation and I wonder where they got it.
  2. WarmWash · 1791149590 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't know if you mean to be reinforcing that it's nothing or not
  3. quietsegfault · 1791149870 · focus · HN ↗
    My state's gasoline refineries use about ~13 million gallons of water each day. It's about .7 gallons of water per gallon of gasoline refined.
  4. alpaca128 · 1791153993 · focus · HN ↗
    So a system to recirculate the same 24 gallons per minute would be more expensive than $100k per year for water?
    xnx · 1791155859 · focus · HN ↗
    Apparently so
    Groxx · 1791157928 · focus · HN ↗
    Condensing the steam back into water would undo the cooling power, so yes. Massively less efficient. Negative efficiency, as required by thermodynamics.
    Your only gains would come from whatever increased surface area the system has, radiating energy however it can. But a radiator without any water involved would be as good or better. Air-cooled datacenters do exist, they're just trading other costs and usually can't release as much heat.
    Dylan16807 · 1791178936 · focus · HN ↗
    Evaporating a gram of water is 2260 joules. Evaporating 20 gallons per minute, 1/3 of a gallon per second, gets rid of around 3 megawatts of heat.
    If you had to use heat pumps to move all that out of the water, you'd have to spend about a million dollars on their electricity. If you're somewhere that you can use unassisted radiators all year, great. If you need to force the heat out part of the year, that easily gets worse than boiling off water.
  5. rtpg · 1791157940 · focus · HN ↗
    Median US household water usage is 130 gallons per day according to Wiki.[0]
    So ~280 households worth of water? Though the US seems to be on the high end, using 3x more than Japan and 4x more than France (according to a random website)[1]
    To state the obvious most people are not running big faucets all the time, and in fact are using way less.
    It seems like a bit of a self-own to not just use household or per-capita usage here to prove a point though.
    [0]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residential_water_use_in_the_U.S._and_Canada" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residential_water_use_in_the_U... [1]: <a href="https://www.worldometers.info/water/" rel="nofollow">https://www.worldometers.info/water/
    WarmWash · 1791161005 · focus · HN ↗
    Framings like this are bad because people think 280 households of water is a lot.
    If we instead look at almonds, something that is a bit of a luxury nut and not at all a necessity, each almond takes about 1 gallon of water to grow.
    A single truck shipment of almonds contains somewhere around 40-50 million almonds all packed up ready for their delivery to Costo or wherever.
    So to frame this another way, Google's DC uses approximately 1/3 of a single truck load of almonds worth of water a year. Most almonds are grown in drought stricken California as well.
    I'm sure we'll be staging the protests and forgoing our emerald nuts 100 cal snack packs any day now.
    Waterluvian · 1791161629 · focus · HN ↗
    That turns the focus to almonds and how insanely bad they are.
    I like when a framing offers a bunch of equivalents. Then the reader can be distracted and horrified by a bunch of issues simultaneously.
    tptacek · 1791170922 · focus · HN ↗
    No, it's just that people notice when they're being asked to concern themselves with numbers this far to the right of the decimal point. It's not just that almonds are bad. It's that they're vastly, heroically worse than data centers, so much so that optimizing water usage at data centers is like reorganizing deck chairs on the Titanic.
    If you actually care about water use, you stop producing ethanol. But nobody really cares about water; that's not what this is about.
    chii · 1791180025 · focus · HN ↗
    > But nobody really cares about water; that's not what this is about.
    you've hit the silent nail on the head.
    The complaints about data centers are really complaints against ai and its encroachment into people's lives (more specifically, they fear for their jobs due to ai).
    If people truly cared so much about the environment, where were their complaints about climate change and such?
    It's the same with the recent hype about how AI going rogue or is gonna kill us all if we reach AGI.
    None of these are real threats, compared to the threat of climate change, where there's a real threat of crop failures enmass due to consistently extreme weather, and coastal erosion sinking cities, etc. We'll hit this before we reach AGI no doubt.
    Teever · 1791173585 · focus · HN ↗
    I have a sneaking suspicion that the talk about the water consumption is a red herring intentionally spread by the PR machines of these companies because it's it reframes the debate around an aspect of the issue that is ultimately irrelevant and distracts from ones that are more important like carbon emissions, pollution, electrical/gas price spikes due to induced scarcity and ultimately how these mega projects have little benefit for the people who will experience all the negative consequences of them.
    Meta recently announced that they want to put a ~2.0 gigawatt DC about 70km from where I live. The provincial government played up the ~60 million that Meta would be doing int he area and the ~250 million in annual tax revenue that they would receive but none of the conversation focused on the wasted opportunity of using the heat generated from this facility to in greenhouses that could operate year round in our cold climate.
    That frustrates me because the waste heat from that single facility alone could go a long way to bootstrapping a greenhouse industry here that would go a long way to ensuring food sovereignty in the region. But of course sovereignty and self-sufficiency are antithetical to the purpose of this AI infrastructure, our government lacks the foresight or will to maximize returns from these kinds of things, and people collectively lacks the ability to think and talk about these things.
    So the best we can do is inconsequential conversation about water usage.
    rtpg · 1791164702 · focus · HN ↗
    Sorry if you think 280 household of water is not a lot and if the facts don't help your cause.
    For a small locality it is a real amount of water. And if there's a draining reservoir, then that's _even more_ water being pulled out of a reservoir.
    The almond discussion is tiring as well. We're not growing almonds in most of the world. The water in Montana isn't the water in Cali as well.
    If the facts aren't on your side on a specific issue, at least have the courage to accept it.
    > I'm sure we'll be staging the protests and forgoing our emerald nuts 100 cal snack packs any day now.
    People protest golf course water usage. Water usage problems in Cali are not as big of a concern to people in Montana than water usage in Montana.
    And of course there are people who think that the added buildout of data centers _for AI usage_ (people acting like "oh these data centers are just from everything", let's not kid ourselves what the source of the demand is) is a net negative. People don't think that about food.
    Personally I think we shouldn't be setting up massive farms in a desert (and perhaps just figure out how to make society work in a way where during winter we accept having less fresh veggies available) either.
    Data center defenders need to get better talking points, cuz they sound very silly (perhaps as silly as the arguments heard on the other side!)
    WarmWash · 1791167044 · focus · HN ↗
    Should I start running through the list of industries that use more water than datacenters?
    Montana exports tons of petroleum products and beef. Should I illustrate how those industries also uses orders of magnitude more water than datacenters?
    In fact, I would be impressed if you could come up with a single locale where a datacenter would be the primary water consumer. Even top 3 would be kind of impressive.
    I'm not sure what you are trying to say other than "datacenters use water and I don't like it, and yeah those other industires in the area use 10-100x more, but like, I don't like datascneters so we need to focus on that"
    I think the real snag is that average people have absolutely -zero- concept of how much water industry uses. Your local recycling plant washes all that dirty plastic you throw in the recycling to the tune of thousands of gallons an hour. And you're learning this right now for the first time in your life. But sure, datacenters running water through metal pipes, five alarm crisis here
    [deleted] · 1791173836 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
    subroutine · 1791174774 · focus · HN ↗
    What happens to the water used by data centers? Is it still clean, just warmed up?
    causesothere · 1791178441 · focus · HN ↗
    It's turned into steam. It's sent up into the atmosphere.

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.