Google Data Centers' Secret Cost: Billions of Gallons of Water (bloomberg.com) 156
To meet surging demand for online information, internet giant taps public water supplies that are already straining from overuse. From a report: In August 2019, the Arizona Municipal Water Users Association built a 16-foot pyramid of jugs in its main entrance in Phoenix. The goal was to show residents of this desert region how much water they each use a day -- 120 gallons -- and to encourage conservation. "We must continue to do our part every day," executive director Warren Tenney wrote in a blog post. "Some of us are still high-end water users who could look for more ways to use water a bit more wisely." A few weeks earlier in nearby Mesa, Google was finalizing plans for a giant data center among the cacti and tumbleweeds. The town is a founding member of the Arizona Municipal Water Users Association, but water conservation took a back seat in the deal it struck with the largest U.S. internet company. Google is guaranteed 1 million gallons a day to cool the data center, and up to 4 million gallons a day if it hits project milestones. If that was a pyramid of water jugs, it would tower thousands of feet into Arizona's cloudless sky.
Alphabet's Google is building more data centers across the U.S. to power online searches, web advertising and cloud services. The company has boasted for years that these huge computer-filled warehouses are energy efficient and environmentally friendly. But there's a cost that the company tries to keep secret. These facilities use billions of gallons of water, sometimes in dry areas that are struggling to conserve this limited public resource. [...] Google considers its water use a proprietary trade secret and bars even public officials from disclosing the company's consumption. But information has leaked out, sometimes through legal battles with local utilities and conservation groups. In 2019 alone, Google requested, or was granted, more than 2.3 billion gallons of water for data centers in three different states, according to public records posted online and legal filings.
Alphabet's Google is building more data centers across the U.S. to power online searches, web advertising and cloud services. The company has boasted for years that these huge computer-filled warehouses are energy efficient and environmentally friendly. But there's a cost that the company tries to keep secret. These facilities use billions of gallons of water, sometimes in dry areas that are struggling to conserve this limited public resource. [...] Google considers its water use a proprietary trade secret and bars even public officials from disclosing the company's consumption. But information has leaked out, sometimes through legal battles with local utilities and conservation groups. In 2019 alone, Google requested, or was granted, more than 2.3 billion gallons of water for data centers in three different states, according to public records posted online and legal filings.
Disapear (Score:5, Insightful)
The water doesn't just magically DISAPPEAR after being used as a thermal container. How much of this water is returned back into the system? How much of this water is pulled directly from a river then returned to it a little warmer? This is how liquid cooling a nuclear power plant works. Why would it be any different for a data center?
Re:Disapear (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, depending on location, data centers have partnered with nearby other facilities that need thermal energy. This has been used as the heating source in HVAC systems in office towers for example. That water flows through the pipes at one location to the other, allowing efficient heat generation where needed nearby.
Re:Disapear (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that a lot of the water is used in evaporative coolers, which vaporize a lot of water, as the name would suggest. That humid air then blows away, leaving local agriculture and municipalities with less water overall.
As for office heating, I doubt there's much need for that in Arizona.
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all that can be done in a controlled manner and recapture the steam.
It's not even hard.
I'm not saying that are doing it, just that they might be.
Re:Disapear (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in the 90's I was able to broker a deal together with a refinery and a chicken products processing plant.
My client bought the hot steam to heat the water, then returned to the plant anywhere from 20c colder to 100c colder. Ended up that they went a bit crazy and ended up being able to heat the entire interior office space, exterior entrances, walkways and worked a separate deals to have a winter melt station for snow removal.
I'm not an engineer, but I am sure this was fun for them.
FYI elizabeth refinery 90's.
Re:Disapear (Score:5, Funny)
This is not just some 90s one off thing either. In the Netherlands there's discussions underway to convert the entire Europoort area into a district heating source for Rotterdam and neighbouring farms. With 4 refineries (including the 2 biggest in Europe), 2 power plants, multiple air separators and hydrogen facilities and several chemical companies in the area there is a fuckton of heat being blasted into the sky (that's metric fucktons, not the imperials ones).
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Fuckton's in metric or imperial units is a REALLY REALLY large amount, exceeding eve a Sagan.
just as a note : That level of Fucktonery as a source input might move something at the rate
of 1.8 terafurlongs per fortnight, nit that's just off the top of my head.
but think on how many megafonzies this would be.
Re:Disapear (Score:5, Informative)
Thermodynamics, my friend. Unless they were discharging the cooling tower air directly into a very large greenhouse, you can’t just recover the evaporated water. Some of the drift can be recovered, but that is insignificant. You can also recover blowdown water, but that is a small percentage of the total.
For a sense of scale, a million gallons of water a day is enough to water a greenhouse that is one square mile ground area.
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I think these silicon valley companies should look outside Silicon Valley for a lot of their resources.
For example, the North Easter US, with a lot of Ex-factory towns begging for businesses, would love a data center in their community, and the North East US, offers 6 months of cold weather, and access to a lot of water in which most is just floating down hills.
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They do,
but the problem is "who controls the flow and usage"
and most of the northeast as of prior to 2015 is trying to restore it's old waterways
Personally, google should look at the mississippi river near locks, I think most
Lock Systems would welcome them as good ice thinning service.
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The single difficulty in siting data centers in the Northeast is probably power. Not the capacity, though that's a question, but availability - most of the area has limited sources. Much of Maine has very limited electricity sources, for instance. The Phoenix area has power supply from several points, and also generates with gas plants. Reliable.
Re: Disapear (Score:2)
I would be surprised if the data centers used the grid as the primary source for their electricity. And there is plenty of natural gas in the northeast. Itâ(TM)s probably mostly about big flat cheap open land, and physical vicinity to areas that want data.
Re:Disapear (Score:5, Informative)
I think these silicon valley companies should look outside Silicon Valley for a lot of their resources.
They do. The datacenter discussed in TFA is in Arizona. Most likely the datacenter is to serve Southern California, but they don't want to locate it in California because of CCPA and other regulations.
But even in Arizona, a million gallons isn't that much water.
TFA says a million gallons would create a pyramid "thousands" of feet high. Actually, a 4 sided pyramid with a volume of a million gallons would be 73 feet high.
The big consumer of water is agriculture. If you add 12" of water to a field, a million gallons is enough to irrigate three acres.
Re: Disapear (Score:2)
The Phoenix data enters I have been too have grey water cooling. One is neat because they built a pond for their heated water dumps. Naturally, they will lose some water to evaporation.
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TFA says a million gallons would create a pyramid "thousands" of feet high. Actually, a 4 sided pyramid with a volume of a million gallons would be 73 feet high.
The article was comparing to jugs of water, so there's also a lot of air mixed in with the water.
The big consumer of water is agriculture.
Absolutely. In Arizona [azwater.gov], agriculture uses 74% of water. In California, it's around 80% for agriculture, although farmers will claim agriculture only uses 40%, with 50% used for environmental purposes, i.e., taking water from nature and putting water back into nature.
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The article was comparing to jugs of water, so there's also a lot of air mixed in with the water.
A pyramid containing a million gallons of water and another million gallons of air would be 92 feet high.
A pyramid a thousand feet high would contain 2.5 billion gallons of water.
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The article was comparing to jugs of water, so there's also a lot of air mixed in with the water.
A pyramid containing a million gallons of water and another million gallons of air would be 92 feet high.
A pyramid a thousand feet high would contain 2.5 billion gallons of water.
For a pyramid that you might build, you are correct because you actually know the difference between a pyramid and a triangle. Unfortunately, the original article used the word pyramid when they actually meant triangle, which can be seen in this photo [assets.bwbx.io] from the original article [bloomberg.com]. So, keeping with their 2-D pyramid, i.e., a triangle, with proportional base and height, the 4-million gallon structure would tower over 500,000 feet high.
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Yeah, fuck the environment. Let big business do whatever they want.
I'm sure that the invisible hand of the free market will touch them inappropriately if they start doing too much damage.
Re:Disapear (Score:5, Informative)
A billion gallons of water weighs 8.34 billion pounds, or 3.78 billion kg. Evaporating it would provide 9.26x10^15 Joules of cooling. Divide that over a year (31.5 million seconds) and you get 293 MW of cooling. In 2011, all of Google's servers worldwide used a combined 260 MW [nytimes.com]. (If you project that out for a year, that's 2.28 TWh. This government report [lbl.gov] says all data centers in the U.S. used 70 TWh in 2014, so the figure appears to be in the right ballpark.) So if all of of Google's servers worldwide were being cooled with evaporative coolers, they still wouldn't use 1 billion gallons in a year.
So the vast majority of this water is probably being used as OP surmised - cooling, then being dumped down the drain or reclaimed for secondary use in irrigation. Not in evaporative coolers.
The problem is something my sister remarked about when she moved from California to Arizona. I walked my dog while visiting her in Phoenix, and was surprised by the huge number of grassy green lawns, many of whom were running their sprinklers during the day (a faux pas in California because a lot of the water evaporates - we're supposed to run our sprinklers at night). She explained that water is dirt cheap in Arizona. The Colorado river runs through Arizona before it hits the California border, so Arizona gets priority in using its water. And boy do they take advantage of it. Despite being in the desert, Phoenix has surprisingly average prices for water [wp.com], especially compared to California.
If you're worried about water wastage in Arizona, Google is (literally) just a drop in the bucket. All of Arizona (and Nevada/Las Vegas) is profligate in its water use [arizona.edu]. There's no point trying to be water-efficient by using evaporative coolers, when you can just dump the heated water down the drain and get new cold water cheaply.
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"data centers have partnered with nearby other facilities that need thermal energy. "
Google never did this to my knowledge. The logistics were too difficult and not worth it.
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The water doesn't just magically DISAPPEAR after being used as a thermal container.
Well it does if you live upstream from the data center.
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This is how liquid cooling a nuclear power plant works. Why would it be any different for a data center?
The water usage by a power plant is subject to a lot of strict environmental impact regulations, very stringent in the case of a NPP. Is this the case here as well? Somehow I doubt it.
Re:Disapear (Score:5, Informative)
"How much of this water is returned back into the system?"
Almost none. It's evaporated into the air, taking the thermals with it.
"How much of this water is pulled directly from a river then returned to it a little warmer?"
None. Google looked at doing that to the Columbia river in Oregon, but the temperature rise it'd cause was deemed as dangerous to the fishing stocks and so it was not allowed to.
The one exception is the DC in Finland, which is adjacent to the sea. They can pull and dump the thermals into the sea directly, as obviously the ocean has more thermal capacity than a single river.
"This is how liquid cooling a nuclear power plant works. Why would it be any different for a data center?"
because power plants are public utilities and Google isn't. What's good for the public isn't necessarily allowed for a private enterprise. Also I don't think that even power plants are allowed to be constructed to do that anymore, as it was realized as being too damaging to ecosystems.
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To evaporate a million gallons of water a day from 20 degrees C takes around 112 MW.
In 2017, total Google data center power used was about 258 MW. Total US data center use was about 10.3 GW.
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Re:Disapear (Score:5, Insightful)
Google wants to keep all that a secret, so we should assume that they're getting all that water from the tap water supply and sending it directly into the atmosphere after use. If they were doing something efficient and sustainable they'd be bragging about it rather than hiding it.
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It doesn't MAGICALLY disappear, but it does evaporate. In doing so, it's effectively no longer available for common use.
It does so in cooling towers. Much of the heat rejected, by nuclear reactors and (I presume(1)) the data center cooling system, is from evaporation in the external cooling tower. The big clouds you could sometimes see over a nuke site? Water vapor from the cooling tower.
(1) I've seen evaporative cooling towers on large commercial buildings I've worked on. It reduces the load on th
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We could locate data centers underwater, just off the California coast, in sealed submarine-like containers. If we could get a continuous jet of steam boiling off each one, we could generate a cloud ribbon above the area to be pushed onshore by the prevailing westerlies. Once this hits the Sierra or the Rockies, we get a little more rainfall into Western watersheds. Data centers that increase> the water supply.
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In Mesa, AZ, most of it, as in all that exits the facility, will be dropped back into the underground aquifers we have here, to be recovered later by wells and pumps, processed and purified, and reused.
It's doubtful Google or any data center will lose much to evaporation, so they are going to pay to pull it in, run it through the systems, and return it mostly unchanged, I bet. This is not disastrous, and we already recycle a lot of water in the Basin. Calm down. Golf courses lose much to evaporation. And th
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I'll bet not. The water is sprayed as a fine mist in a chiller and evaporates, providing cooling.
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It's doubtful Google or any data center will lose much to evaporation, so they are going to pay to pull it in, run it through the systems, and return it mostly unchanged, I bet.
Like taking candy from a baby: "Google relies on “evaporative cooling,” which evaporates water to cool the air around the processing units stacked inside data centers, according to its environmental report. The most common systems, known as computer room air conditioners, are energy intensive. Evaporative cooling uses less energy, but the process requires more water. " There's even a pic in the article: https://assets.bwbx.io/images/... [assets.bwbx.io]
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If it's used for evaporative cooling (as it often is), the water effectively disappears from the local system.
Isn't it recycled? (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, surely Google isn't just pumping the water post-cooling into the sewer, right? I mean, sure, it might be a couple degrees warmer, but is there any reason it couldn't still be potable and put back into the system?
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Even if it's pumped into the sewer, that doesn't mean it can't be filtered/treated and reused. Only very water-limited countries like Singapore filter their sewage to the extent that it can be reused for potable drinking water, but even if you don't take it to that level, you can still use non-potable reclaimed water for other purposes, like agriculture or industrial purposes.
Re:Isn't it recycled? (Score:4, Insightful)
It very much does when the pressure to host a business becomes a regulatory race to the bottom. Rules are bent, exemptions appear, and the cost of the externalities created by the "attractive business environment" are rarely, if ever weighted against the benefits it brings to a community.
Doubly so if it is a very large business and the "prestige" of hosting it eclipses all other considerations, which is also a very typical occurrence.
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Or they could promise "jobs!" to the government and get permission to dump it all down the drain. That seems cheaper.
Re:Isn't it recycled? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not recycled (Score:2)
It looks like the heat is used to boil/evaporate the water as part of the cooling process.
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Surface vs throughout the liquid (Score:2)
Both evaporation and boiling involve vaporization, a change of state from liquid to gas. There is, however, a reason that there are two different words, and that rhe data sheet for any substance lists it's boiling point.
Evaporation takes place at the surface of a liquid, where it contacts the air or other gas. This occurs at any temperature above absolute zero at which the liquid can exist in a stable state.
Boiling takes place throughout the liquid, or commonly at the point where heat is applied, such as at
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There is lots of speculation about how data centre chillers work in the comments on this story. There are both air chillers and water chillers. Most data centres use air chillers and do not "consume" water (only a small amount is lost). But you CAN have evaporative chillers which it sounds like Google decided to do in this case. This is just Google being cheap and trying to get their PUE down to the detriment of their WUE. Almost all DC chillers have economizers on them now to take advantage of the out
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It's not impossible Mesa is providing non-potable water, but i doubt it. That's used for landscaping.
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When water is used for evaporative cooling, its content of minerals and any other junk that's in it shoots up. It's kinda like anti-distilled water; distilled to be more polluted.
At a particular power plant near me, that water is pumped to an adjacent farm where it's used for irrigation. The cost of processing it or the damage from putting it back into the river is too high, but it's acceptable for irrigation water.
Point of comparison (Score:4, Informative)
I'm sure we can argue about that being too much or something along those lines, but I think there's a tendency to try to create a scare about water usage by using big numbers in the millions without really equating it to anything that most people can comprehend.
I know that the Phoenix area has a large number of retirees and a lot of open air swimming pools. I don't know how quickly those need to replenish their water due to natural evaporation, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that data center usage is a drop in the bucket when you stack it up against all of the other things that are being done with the water.
Re:Point of comparison (Score:5, Insightful)
Compare Google's datacenter cooling use directly to the desert golf course use (looking at you, Phoenix/Scottsdale/Paradise Valley). Who's wasting more water per customer served?
Re:Point of comparison (Score:5, Informative)
Good Point. Looking at the 2015 number, AZCentral estimated that all the Phx Area golf courses used 80 Million Gallons per day. With over 200 golf courses in the area, it averages out to about 250,000 gallons per day for each course.
That means that the Google data center will use between 4 and 16 golf courses of water each day.
Pool usage, however, is a much lower number. It is found that each pool uses about 15 gallons per day. That means that it takes about 16,000 pools to equal 1 golf course, or 67,000 to 267,000 pools to equal 1 data center of water usage.
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So I have a pool. You're not coming on my lawn, so tough.
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Phoenix, AZ uses approx. 2 billion gallons of water per day. Approx. 35% of that is use for drinking water.
(Source: https://askabiologist.asu.edu/... [asu.edu])
Water doesn't get used up. (Score:4, Insightful)
We aren't running out of water .. recycling it, and everything else, is all a matter of energy. If we won't build solar and nuclear power (fission). And sadly we aren't even bothering to put anything but a token amount of money in research clean energy from nuclear fusion .. so yeah we're gonna be in pooper.
Would that contribute to global warming? (Score:2)
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Yes. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas. But also no, because clouds increase albedo. So... it depends.
What kind of cooling system do they use? (Score:2)
Cooling towers? Then they have to make up evaporation and a blowdown to keep the salt content (TDS) in range. That is a lot less water than the article mentions. And they could cut that down with an RO unit on the blowdown line.
If they are doing it once through and out, whoever granted the permit needs to be flogged.
Is water really scarce? (Score:3)
Again, not trying to be an environmental asshole, just genuinely curios. I live in Arizona. We water our nice green yards daily. We have hundreds of golf courses. We flush millions of gallons of fresh water down the toilet. Water supply just doesn't seem to be a problem.
Is there really a lack of water, or is it just a matter of getting the water to the places that need it?
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Your statements are mostly correct.
While there are Aquifers that have run dry or drying. it's really about resource movement.
if florida, aquifers as they get drained cause the land to come down.
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The more important question, which I think you alluded to, is do you have a water management problem? Just because there's no perceived shortage, doesn't mean there are significant issues with how that water is being provided. California is the poster child for this. Only once shortages were 'discovered', did anyone think about the sources. As a result, we've depleted underground aquifers that are resulting in much bigger issues like sink holes, insufficient resupply, etc. Arizona would do well to be m
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California is the poster child for this. Only once shortages were 'discovered', did anyone think about the sources.
? If you lived in California you'd know that Californians have been talking about water shortages and distribution for as long as you've been alive.
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The problem is easily reached water that doesn't cost too much to make drinkable. We have the oceans, but desalination costs money and that only works for coastal areas unless you also build a very expensive pipeline. Arizona is mostly desert, so there's not a huge amount of water in the area.
In other places, there is enough water overall, but there are rainy times of year and dry times of year. The more fresh water is used, the bigger the reservoirs have to be to have enough during the dry times.
Large indu
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To me, that seems like a very minor problem in the world. Outside of political bickering, nobody is running out of water. Some people just have to pay more for it.
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Fine, you can pay $20 per gallon and never shower again if you like, but the rest of us would like to be able to afford water. The costs go up fast when you need to expand supply in some places. If the large scale users would like to foot the bill for vastly expanding the supply, that's OK too, but they keep trying to push that off on the people consuming within easy natural availability. Same old story, privatize the profits, socialize the costs.
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Yes, yes it is (Score:3)
But few are willing to call it a "problem" at this moment.
Just watch this 2016 PBS documentary [pbs.org]. There are people living out in rural Arizona who have to keep digging deeper and deeper wells to get water out of the ground, because it's being sucked up faster than it's being replenished, much due to farming. That's your canary in the coal mine. Just like the boiling frog, most people don't see it as a problem this moment, because they're still getting water from the tap. Sure, right now, lawns are green,
Outrage! Rabble rabble! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's Google. While they're notably more evil than they used to be, they're not Exxon. If I were them in Arizona, I'd be using either non-potable water from saltwater aquifers (despite the additional expense in dealing with the corrosion) or building all of my plumbing to potable water standards and returning it to the municipal supply after it runs through the cooling loop (again, in spite of the somewhat higher expense).
Outside of Arizona, it's largely a nonissue. Their datacenters in Washington state get both power and water from the Columbia river. When you're tapping an entire river for coolant water, your water usage is utterly irrelevant. There's more available fresh water than anybody knows what to do with.
Water is one of the most strictly local resources on Earth, the pipeline from Colorado to California notwithstanding. It's incredibly heavy. No one with any sense moves it any farther than they have to before using it. In consequence, in the US water usage standards that are sensible in Arizona or California or Colorado are laughably stupid almost anywhere else in the country. In the Midwest, cities tap the entire watersheds of the Missouri, Illinois, Ohio, and Mississippi rivers, such a colossal amount of water that only the Army Corp of Engineers really grasps how much it is.
In short, Google's 2.3 billion gallons of water usage in three different states is meaningless unless you say WHICH states. Washington state? Shut up and go home. New York state? Go have a look at Niagra Falls, and then shut up and go home. Arizona's 4 million? Out of 2300 million? Shut up, you're boring, stupid, and innumerate, and we're tired of your useless fake enviro-wankery articles like this one.
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Also, just a note, it's improbable that Google is permitted to tap the aquifer and drill wells. Even homeowners that want to cannot, by law. And that's not the water you want to drink or even use to cool with. It needs some work.
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What pipeline from Colorado to California? The Colorado River? Which is quite horribly oversubscribed in terms of committed use vs. available flow? You haven't heard that Lake Mead is slowly draining away?
Then: server cooling is, as others have noted, consumptive. Much of the water is evaporated away. What remains is quite contaminated by chemicals used in the cooling system, and has to be disposed of carefully. This isn't, as with coastal nukes, a case of running the water once through a heat exchanger and
Really Appalling Destruction of Water (Score:2)
As I noted elsewhere it seems that this water is boiled/evaporated to provide cooling for the data centres.
I would think that there are other ways to dump the heat that would be beneficial to the communities that these server farms are located in - this amount of water should at least be used for farming, in the worst case. I'm sure all these methods would be more expensive but as a member of the community I would think it would behoove them to consider those approaches first.
Google, you should be doing be
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Of course it's re-condensed, as rain, in another state or over the Atlantic.
Conservation is for consumers, not corporations. (Score:2)
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and? (Score:2)
You act like 2.3 billion gallons is a lot.
It really isn't.
"2.3 billion gallons of water for data centers in three different states,"
come on.
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You act like 2.3 billion gallons is a lot. It really isn't.
It is if you can't get water.
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You act like 2.3 billion gallons is a lot.
It really isn't.
It is if you can't get water.
Do tell. When was the last time you couldn't get water?
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Oh, only about five years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Isn't the internet supported by data centers? (Score:2)
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The article seems to suggest Google is unique in using water to cool its data centers. Don't know how accurate that is.
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So raise the price? (Score:2)
If they are really wasting so much valuable water, why not raise the price for water to the value of water? Then they can decide whether to pay or not.
Does it really have to be more complicated than that?
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Sounds like the town is giving them a huge break on the price, for the "prestige" of having a Google data center in town -- and presumably the promise of some jobs. Unfortunately such deals frequently fail to bring the economic benefits they promise.
If that's true, and they're not paying the full cost of what they're taking, you could expect homeowners water bills to rise to cover the difference.
cold places? (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure,there's cost to bring in power and fiber, but there is millions of gallons of water and cold temperatures 9 months of the year.
Today in Whitehorse it is 5F (-15C).
In Anchorage it is 24F (-5C).
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Because then solar power wouldn't work nearly as well. Iceland would be the place to do it -- cold climate AND free energy.
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If we strictly follow highway rights-of-way, Whitehorse to Miami is about 7,000 km. So a return trip at light-speed is 47 miliseconds. Plenty fast enough to stream YouTube, run Google Docs or return a search query.
For Google Hangouts you might want the servers closer, to be sure.
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Worse. Rule of thumb is 5 microseconds per km through fiber (in reality it's a bit faster but it'll never be slower). So in your example that's 35 ms each way, or 70 ms round trip before you add in switching and routing latency.
How is the water used? Details? (Score:2)
Why is the article skipping over such important information specifically as how the water is used? When I do a search there is some mention about water being used for energy generation but again no details.
If the water is being used for evaporative cooling in drought stricken areas then there needs to be a hanging. I can't imagine how it is used in power generation. Solar pv and wind don't need water last I checked. Further I don't see how they need fresh water. If it is used for some process then I don't u
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Bad claims in summary (Score:3)
Thousands of feet high? Really? Pyramids tend to have their length and width equal to their height (so they are self-supporting). There are about 264 gallons per cubic meter, so 1 million gallons would be about 3800 cubic meters. That would be a pyramid about 23m on a side, and 23m tall. About 75 feet tall. Hardly "thousands" of feet.
To be "thousands of feet" high, let's assume it's 2,001 feet high. Just enough to make it into the "second thousand" to qualify as a plural. The base would need to be about 14 feet x 14 feet. That's a "pyramid"? It's more of a VERY, very slightly narrowing pointy stick. Not a pyramid.
And the media wonders why they are continually losing more trust with the public...
Price (Score:2)
Specifically what has gone wrong there is pricing. Federal and municipal governments interfere with market pricing.
By granting monopolies:
And by cutting special deals with corporations:
Ignore the obvious (Score:2)
The goal was to show residents of this desert region how much water they each use a day -- 120 gallons -- and to encourage conservation. "We must continue to do our part every day," executive director Warren Tenney wrote in a blog post.
I have a suggestion - move to some place that's not a fucking desert.
There is *ZERO* discharge water from chillers (Score:2)
Chillers work similarly to swamp coolers, the energy magic is in the state change from liquid to gas (steam). There is a pool of water that is recycled until it evaporates off. As it evaporates off new water enters the pool. The water can be very nasty - see Legionnaires' disease. But the water leaves as vapor, never liquid so there is no chance for reclamation. Best if they are using gray-water.
Re: (Score:3)