Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage
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Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage
Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
yeag123 · · focus · HN ↗
The average Nebraska farm is 989 acers[1] as of 2022 and uses roughly ~1,200 acre-feet of water (or roughly 390 million gallons) per year[2]. So a single average Nebraska farm uses roughly 30 times the water the Lincoln data center uses per year. There are 44,479 farms/ranches covering 44 million acres, which accounts for over 90% of the state's total land area.
Until I looked this up, I didn't appreciate the scale of water usage in farming (even in a state like Nebraska that gets a large amount of rainfall compared to Central or Southern California). I hope that the current data center environmental focus continues to shed light on our industrial water and electrical usage.
[1]<a href="http://farmflavor.com/nebraska/nebraska-crops-livestock/top-nebraska-agriculture-facts/" rel="nofollow">http://farmflavor.com/nebraska/nebraska-crops-livestock/top-... [2]<a href="https://cropwatch.unl.edu/2024/2023-irrigation-and-water-management-data-now-available/" rel="nofollow">https://cropwatch.unl.edu/2024/2023-irrigation-and-water-man...
zahlman · · focus · HN ↗
It's really just a matter of appreciating how much land is involved. Converting to metric, that's 370mm of water per year across the entire land surface. For comparison (per Wikipedia) that's about double the annual rainfall in Phoenix AZ, but considerably less than in San Fransisco (and way less than East Coast cities). Of course, that's in addition to the natural Nebraska rainfall, but you get the idea. It's not an absurd amount.