Thread

Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage

403 points · 533 comments · sensanaty

yeag123 · 1791176084 · focus · HN ↗
As other commenters have pointed out, 13.3 million gallons = ~40.8 acre-feet and this being Nebraska, the obvious comparison is agriculture (Corn and Soybeans being the main crop).
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...
1. beAbU · 1791186240 · focus · HN ↗
  TIL about the acre-foot. Sometimes, you Americans are really funny with your units !
  1. bulatb · 1791192684 · focus · HN ↗
    An acre-foot is one acre of land, several large suburban lots here in Silicon Valley, covered in a foot of water. I can roughly picture that as soon as I hear "acre-foot" because it's one common thing times one common thing and the unit's name says so. It's exactly what a person needs when reading about water use in farming, which is literally covering a plot of land in water.
    It's not useful for converting cubic liters into decananograms, but good communication doesn't make the reader do that in the first place.

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