Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage
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Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage
Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
mrb · · focus · HN ↗
The water bill alone would be only $100k/yr assuming average US domestic rate of $8 per 1000 gallons.
rtpg · · focus · HN ↗
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 · · focus · HN ↗
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.
rtpg · · focus · HN ↗
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 · · focus · HN ↗
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] · · focus · HN ↗
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