Thread

1. aliasxneo · 1791145670 · focus · HN ↗

   I lived in a smaller rural town near a Google datacenter. During my career there I had routinely come across some outlandish accusations made about our water/power usage from the locals. But for obvious reasons I could never dispute them. I remember we hired a local who'd grown up in the town and he was "really surprised" when he started to see what we were doing to remain efficient.

   The current data center craze just feels like the same thing but on a bigger scale.

   1. bix6 · 1791146583 · focus · HN ↗

      Ok and? This wouldn’t be an issue if google et al would just share the numbers instead of hiding behind NDAs and whatever else.

      1. fastball · 1791146906 · focus · HN ↗

         Are you sure? People think water for data centers is "consumed", like the output is sewage or something. Giving those people concrete numbers is not gonna change such misconceptions (and that's assuming they look at such numbers in reasonable relative terms in the first place).

         1. Lanktion · 1791150332 · focus · HN ↗

            It is consumed because they evaporate it away and remove it from the local environment.

            They easily could build near heating system or cooling the water down in another probably big facility close by and send it to the city

            1. fastball · 1791151085 · focus · HN ↗

               Evaporated water stays in the water cycle though. It comes back down as rain, and returns to the water sources that were depleted (assuming these data centers are generally not using underground aquifers, which I think is true).

               1. phatfish · 1791154121 · focus · HN ↗

                  You can't control the water cycle over a datacenter and its water source, it is a global system.
               2. kube-system · 1791170304 · focus · HN ↗

                  The issue for most (well, at least those who are informed and not just bandwagoning) is that it raises the prices of utilities, in which case it doesn't really matter that it stays in the water cycle. If your local municipal water authority has to expand operations to keep up with demand, that is going to incur capital costs which will either raise rates or require tax dollars.

                  While this water usage might be not a big deal in places with abundant water, it could be problematic in some areas of the US.

            2. timschmidt · 1791156478 · focus · HN ↗

               > They easily could build near heating system or cooling the water down in another probably big facility close by and send it to the city

               Nope. While it's technically possible via natural gas fuel cells which are near 100% efficient in combined cycle electric / heat recovery use as compared to our city's existing ~35% efficient combined cycle natural gas fired steam turbine. And one such installation was proposed for this city in the 24MW range. Our beloved local citizens believed it, without reason and in open opposition to openly shared information to the contrary, to be a water guzzling/polluting, pollutant belching, energy consuming, mass surveillance enabling dystopian thing.

               Flushed $120M in local investment down the toilet and signed up for worse air quality from ageing inefficient infrastructure because a datacenter is a big faceless thing that's safe to hate.

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