Oregon City Sues To Keep Google's Water Use Secret (oregonlive.com) 89
Ahead of a key city council vote on a $28.5 million water pact with Google, the city of The Dalles filed suit in state court Friday in an effort to keep the tech giant's water use a secret. The Oregonian/OregonLive reports: The city is seeking to overturn a ruling earlier this month from Wasco County's district attorney, who found Google's water use is a public record and ordered The Dalles to provide that information to The Oregonian/OregonLive. The city sued the news organization Friday, asking a judge to intervene.
Google is contemplating two new server farms on the site of a former aluminum smelter in The Dalles, where it already has an enormous campus of data centers on its property along the Columbia River. Google says it needs more water to cool its data centers, but neither the company nor the city will say how much more -- only that The Dalles can't meet Google's needs without expanding its water system. The deal calls for Google to pay for the upgrade. Even so, the proposed water pact has attracted scrutiny and skepticism in The Dalles, a riverfront city of about 15,000 approximately 80 miles east of Portland.
Residents and nearby farmers are concerned about the city's water long-term water supply amid an ongoing drought. They complain they don't know enough about Google's actual water use. The city is now going to court to keep that information under wraps, arguing it's a Google "trade secret" exempt from disclosure under Oregon law. Regardless of how the city's suit plays out, the litigation won't be resolved before the city council votes on Google's water deal on the evening of Nov. 8. That means the public won't have access to that information, though city council members do. This new agreement "could boost property tax collections by several million dollars a year but still figure to save Google tens of millions of dollars over the 15-year life of the tax breaks," the report notes. "It doesn't appear Google can proceed without more water, however."
Google is contemplating two new server farms on the site of a former aluminum smelter in The Dalles, where it already has an enormous campus of data centers on its property along the Columbia River. Google says it needs more water to cool its data centers, but neither the company nor the city will say how much more -- only that The Dalles can't meet Google's needs without expanding its water system. The deal calls for Google to pay for the upgrade. Even so, the proposed water pact has attracted scrutiny and skepticism in The Dalles, a riverfront city of about 15,000 approximately 80 miles east of Portland.
Residents and nearby farmers are concerned about the city's water long-term water supply amid an ongoing drought. They complain they don't know enough about Google's actual water use. The city is now going to court to keep that information under wraps, arguing it's a Google "trade secret" exempt from disclosure under Oregon law. Regardless of how the city's suit plays out, the litigation won't be resolved before the city council votes on Google's water deal on the evening of Nov. 8. That means the public won't have access to that information, though city council members do. This new agreement "could boost property tax collections by several million dollars a year but still figure to save Google tens of millions of dollars over the 15-year life of the tax breaks," the report notes. "It doesn't appear Google can proceed without more water, however."
Yeah, that's going to dispel concerns (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have to keep it under wraps, it's probably even worse than most people feared.
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It seems like a strange hill to die on. How much proprietary advantage does google really get from this particular piece of information?
Re:Yeah, that's going to dispel concerns (Score:5, Insightful)
How much proprietary advantage does google really get from this particular piece of information?
If you know how much water they're using and the overall size of the server farm, you can estimate how many servers they have at the location. Granted, that only tells you the number of servers, not how they're configured or what equipment they're using.
Had a converstation with someone at work a while back. I was reading the book written by Valerie Plame, the undercover CIA agent who was outted during the Bush (the second one) administration. I told the guy it was hilarious reading because either a word or two would be blacked out in a sentence, or entire paragraphs would be nothing but black lines. I said I understood the need to keep some things secret such as specific locations for meetings, people's names, and so forth, but in context of many of the sentences, it seemed funny to leave out the name of a well known restaurant.
He explained, having been in signal intelligence, that having that one piece of information could be cross-referenced with other pieces which could then paint the full picture, disclose operational methods, etc. The same here. Just knowing the amount of water and size of the operation can be combined with other tidbits to figure out Google's operations.
Re:Yeah, that's going to dispel concerns (Score:4, Insightful)
Bet half the water is being used to water the lawn. Literally.
Server farms can recapture the steam and just re-use the water. There's no real reason to let that energy go nor allow any H2O to leak out. You can funnel it right back into the energy grid with a simple electric generator hooked up to the steam. If you're Google scale why wouldn't you do it?
This is one dumb hill to die on.
Re:Yeah, that's going to dispel concerns (Score:4, Informative)
Steam? What steam? This is water used to cool their servers. I don't know what type of cooling Google uses in their server rooms, but I doubt the processors are running hot enough to turn the water into steam.
If the city water is consistently cool enough, they might be using the water directly to cool the server rooms. More likely they have a closed-loop system in the server room and use the city water in a heat exchanger to removed the heat from the closed loop. The temperature in The Dalles only exceeds 80 degrees during the three summer months so I don't understand why an outside cooling plant couldn't cool and recirculate their cooling water more efficiently.
Unless they get water so cheaply that they can just use it for cooling then flush it (perhaps literally).
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Re:Yeah, that's going to dispel concerns (Score:4, Informative)
One way to do that is to spray water mist on the hot side of an AC unit. This will drastically improve heat transfer.
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Reading between the lines of TFA, Google might actually be using a once-thru water-cooling system, using the cold fresh water directly with no refrigeration machines, then treating the used water and pumping it back into the aquifer. That would provide considerably less A/C tonnage, but would be almost free cooling, only costing the pumping power.
This is a popular and green method, as it uses less electricity than a refrigeration type system, and returns almost 100% of the "used" water directly to the aquifer. Very little of the water is wasted in this type of system.
As most of the water used is directly returned to the aquifer, the usage numbers are misleading when compared to other uses of water where water is discharged into the sewage system or allowed to evaporate into the atmosphere.
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Unless they get water so cheaply that they can just use it for cooling then flush it (perhaps literally).
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Or dumping it back in a reservoir. There's several datacenters in dumb places like Atlanta that do this.
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Just knowing the amount of water and size of the operation can be combined with other tidbits to figure out Google's operations.
Yeah, so what? In the case of military assets such security might be warranted, but Google? Not even not so much, but not at all. The number of servers they have in any given location is frankly worthless information to competitors. It won't provide any information on capabilities they couldn't get by buying a single share of stock and reading the shareholders reports.
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This is a book "Seizing the Enigma: The Race to Break the German U-Boat Codes, 1939–1943" that discusses something very similar. The Allies were able to answer a lot of questions about the Enigma by putting together seeming disparate pieces of information.
It's an interesting read, if history is your thing.
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You can get that kind of ballpark estimate from just the square footage of the building for the zoning and permitting applications, and you know that should be public knowledge.
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And even if it's not just fly an aircraft over it and take a photograph. If they are not generating the power on site then you can also work out the max power usage of the site relatively easily too.
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If you have to keep it under wraps, it's probably even worse than most people feared.
Yes, yes it is [cnn.com].
Re:Yeah, that's going to dispel concerns (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Yeah, that's going to dispel concerns (Score:3)
Re:Yeah, that's going to dispel concerns (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have to keep it under wraps, it's probably even worse than most people feared.
Worse for whom? I'd wager since it's the government keeping it under wraps that the problem is unlikely to be the amount of water Google is consuming, but rather the terms and conditions associated with that consumption which no doubt differ from those offered to farmer or other "common folk".
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In Soviet Oregon, water steams you!
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Just logging in to point out that even the title is obscurium. Oregon City isn't suing, The Dalles, OR is suing. Google has no significant presence in Oregon City, nor in Dallas, OR, the later of which is often confused with The Dalles, OR.
It's not like the water dissapears (Score:1)
It may get a bit warmer or dissipated after it runs through a steam tower.
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This is true on its face, but it cannot be sent directly back into the Columbia or whatever river they're using. The native fish don't like warm water.
Plus, short of anything else, how can google foot the bill if the city properties are being assessed? Which of these is more true? I would vote those councilors out. The attorney acted correctly, I think.
And to be clear, it's "The Dalles." The whole thing pronounced thuh-daLz.
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The answer is obvious, give the warm water to the farmers. By the time it gets to the fields it should be back down to ambient temperature.
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I'm sure Google will if you ask them. I doubt if it is a significant expense compared to the cost of a data center.
Re: It's not like the water dissapears (Score:2)
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Of course they do when they run 300 miles. This is all localized into an area of under ten miles. Check out Hood River, OR on a map.
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The datacenter is right on the Columbia River.
There is irrigated farmland just a few miles to the south.
Search for "google data center 97058".
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There is a convenient mountain right next to the city.
https://1889mag.com/wp-content... [1889mag.com]
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May there is a technical solution to be had. Google could send that water vapor up Mt Hood in a pipe. As it climbs in altitude it should condense and run back down the pipe. They do have a convenient 11,000ft mountain.
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Most likely they're running a giant evaporator to get rid of all the heat
Nope. The current datacenter is clearly visible on Google Maps and there are no evaporators anywhere near it.
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In an open-loop evaporative cooling system, typically only 3% evaporates. If they're using most of the 5,000,000 gallons per day mentioned in TFA for a system like that, it would be a huge A/C system, able to cool well over 2,000,000 sq ft of high-density data center.
There's also the possibility that they're planning on using the water directly without evaporation or maybe eve
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The answer is obvious ...
A perhaps less obvious solution is to switch to more efficient processors.
The M1 is about 3 times as power-efficient as the x86 CPUs that Google is currently using.
Even if Apple is unwilling to share, Google has the resources to design its own. Google employees designed the TPU.
What would be really slick is if Google uses RISC-V.
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They also have a need to be competitive with AWS and Azure, and that means keeping a whole lot of x86-64 around. AWS already has their arm-based "gravitron" CPUs so they're going down this road already, but there's workloads (see: Windows Server) that you can't use arm for... yet.
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Sorry, that's not how that works. A typical datacentre is going to be fully provisioned based on space and available power. Even if Google were able to replicate Apple's success and if they were somehow able to make server CPUs that are "more efficient" than something like Milan or Genoa (which is highly questionable), Google would just stack more hardware until maxing out the available power. They would probably not run out of space.
fwiw Google is allegedly working on their own internal CPUs to rival Am
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This water is being used in giant evaporative cooling equipment. It's not like they're running hoses into each and every server with water blocks on the CPUs or something. It is being sprayed on heat exchangers to increase efficiency of heat exchange, which turns this water into humid air which is exhausted to the atmosphere.
There's very little left to "give" to anyone except the rain clouds.
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Water vapor is a GHG
Water is currently in short supply in most places
If Google is wasting water by putting it into the atmosphere then they're doing actual harm in multiple ways.
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Approximately 3% evaporates (essentially "disappears") in a typical cooling tower, and the remainder gets about 10F warmer than it came in (depending on ambient air conditions and selection of the tower.)
Sold out (Score:5, Insightful)
It's time for a new city council. They no longer work for the people in Dalles but have sold out to big corporations with tax credits and shady back room deals.
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What is being done to the water? (Score:1)
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I think the biggest issue with that would be the temperature of the waste water, algae blooms and whatnot. I'd be absolutely gobsmacked if the issue is running out of water -- the columbia is several hundred yards across in that area; unless google is needing highly treated/purified water (unlikely, unless it's for chip fab?)
On an aside, I grew up in eastern OR, and remember driving through the dalles as well as having baseball/swim meets there; it was this podunk little nothing town (same with hood river)
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FWIW, my sister liven in South Dakota before moving to Bend.
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They probably do need purified water, so that they don't have to shut down and descale their cooling equipment. That would put a pretty big crimp in your operation plan.
More than that, it's likely that there isn't any warm water to return, because it's used in evaporative cooling. It's moist air that is discharged.
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It would likely need to be chemically treated to prevent corrosion & biological growth, and to reduce scaling.
At the risk of being redundant, typical evaporative cooling systems only evaporate around 3% of the circulated water. If this is a conven
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More likely, they just dump it down the drain so municipal treatment handles it, because it's cheaper(for them. Sounds like an effective way to cost-shift and save on cooling costs at the same time.
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And my thought is, why do they need potable water if it's intended for cooling servers? Couldn't they just use gray water? Sure, some impurities might make it slightly less effective at conducting heat, but if they're running things that close to the edge, it seems like a whole other issue.
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That's what they do in Northern Virginia's "Data Center Alley." They use and recycle grey water from the local water treatment plant. It works very well, but our area is flush with plentiful fresh water year-round so it's moot, while well-meaning.
Too bad most of the power here comes from coal, but we'll get over that eventually.
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Because you don't want to spray water with unknown mineral content on a heat evaporator, coating it with that unknown mineral content and reducing it's efficiency at transferring heat over time. It's the same as needing to descale your coffee maker's heating element every once in a while if you have hard water - it can't boil water if there's a sufficient layer of calcium between the heating element and the water.
Industrial purification takes care of that problem.
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The fish (salmon mostly) don't like warm water and lately most of the rivers in that part of the world are getting too warm in the summer as it is.
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In Chicago, there have been a few big buildings downtown that used river water that way. It hasn't been legal for 30 years or more, but some particular cases are grandfathered in.
Odd nothing about environmental impact (Score:2)
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The environmental groups are worrying more about global warming (aka climate change). See COP26.
Classic Google (Score:4, Informative)
This is classic google. They want to know everything about everyone and everything and somehow that is OK. But they go out of their way to avoid leaking any data about themselves that they can.
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This has nothing to do with Google. This is the government doing to suing to keep records hidden under false pretenses. The point here is not to hide how much water Google is using, but rather how much the government sold out the state to a corporation.
Classic government.
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So you think google would be perfectly happy having the information disclosed and it is just the local officials who are embarrassed by the extent they are rolling over for google? Notice that the government officials in question specifically said they need to keep the information secret because it is a google trade secret. Why doesn't google just publicly announce they are OK with the information being disclosed? More likely they are communicating in no uncertain terms to the officials that the information
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So you think google would be perfectly happy having the information disclosed
Yes. That's typically what happens when any company requests the use of any government managed resource. That request is not only subject to FOIA, but nearly always subject to public consultation as well. And this before we get into the fact that Google actually publish their water usage figures in their annual environmental reports.
Notice that the government officials in question specifically said they need to keep the information secret because it is a google trade secret.
Yes government officials say a lot to justify what they want.
More likely they are communicating in no uncertain terms to the officials that the information must be kept secret.
Nothing likely about your scenario. Not only is water consumption not a trade secret, Google even publish how water
Wonder how this will affect Facebook and Apple (Score:3)
Wonder how this will affect Facebook and Apple datacenters in Oregon's High Desert, where water is more scarce than most people can imagine.
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Don't forget AWS - their us-west-2 region is in Boardman, Oregon just up I-84 from The Dalles.
I think we need to back up... (Score:5, Interesting)
(answer: because they're forcing the externalities of operation onto the community commons and would rather die than actually pay the full true cost of operation. see also greenhouse gas emission)
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And ask why they haven't been told to either close the coolant loop or put enough air heat exchange on the outgoing open loop hot water to render its temperature acceptable?
The answer is that completely closed aircooling is woefully insufficient to meet even moderate cooling capacities of a facility which generates heat. This isn't your living room AC unit. At a certain point you either need to dump heat using a medium with higher thermal mass (e.g. open loop cooling from a large water reservoir which is nearly always an external supply but has the effect of raising the supply's temperature) or rely heavily on evaporative cooling which then as the name implies needs to be topp
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Cobblers. For most of the year at my work the HPC is cooled by pumping water onto the roof through large radiators and then back down into the data centre and through the large radiators on the rear rack doors. Admittedly we are not Google but it is perfectly possible. A quick Google suggest that this should be possible in Dalles for 10 months of the year.
Perhaps Google could use a heatpump on the hot side of the cooling loop and provide district hot water and hearing to the city of Dalles if they where rea
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Admittedly we are not Google
And that was my point. Not all engineering solutions scale especially inefficient solutions such as radiative and convective cooling.
Perhaps Google could use a heatpump on the hot side of the cooling loop and provide district hot water and hearing to the city of Dalles if they where really after some green credentials.
They almost certainly already have heatpumps involved. Google has entire divisions dedicated to datacentre R&D and improving sustainability. They publish annual reports showing targets for ever improving efficiencies and resource usage. Their published information alone shows they put far more thought into your over simplified solution than you give them credit for.
Funny y
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I got an idea!! (Score:2)
How about we use all that waste heat from server farms to distill drinking water from non-potable sources?
By reducing the pressure in the heat ex-changer the boiling point of the water could be dropped to something reasonable for cooling a server then the vapor could be sent into the cooling tower to condense at a normal pressure. The resulting pure water could be used for lots of things like watering the lawns of the Google Campus.
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The problem with this, is that wherever you are turning the water into vapor is where the impurities will remain. You've just made a very nice recipe for clogging up your expensive cooling equipment with calcium and other soluble metals.
This is why the input is purified water.
Public (Score:2)
The title is very confusing because "Oregon City" (Score:1)
Why don't they re-use it? (Score:2)
After all, it's not like they were cooling dirty steel blocks with direct contact.
Even my car reuses the cooling liquid.
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"Comparing the heat output of your Camry to the heat output of tens of thousands of servers is pretty fucking stupid."
Only tens of thousands?
Then a tiny cooling tower would do.
effect (Score:1)
Columbia river is huge (Score:2)
There is a huge volume of water there (average discharge 265,000 cu ft/s ). There's not water shortage in the traditional sense, there's just a limitation of plant capacity, that was designed for a city of 15,000.
What are they doing to the water? (Score:2)
If its a simple chiller, What are they doing to the water that it cant be returned to the river for use downstream? If its for chillers, doesnt the water just pass through pipes and heat exchangers and exit the system warmer than when it entered?
Or is that the reason, that warming the river would be harmful? How would that be any different than a natural shallow section that absorbed solar heat, heating the water naturally?
On the surface, this doesnt make sense to me. And the tinfoil hat says "what are the
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If its a simple chiller, What are they doing to the water that it cant be returned to the river for use downstream?
I am speculating that they want water of known quality, without impurities that might harm the cooling system. These impurities could be quite harmless things in a river, such as silt, bits of dead leaves, little organisms, and so on. If they used river water directly, they would have to build their own water treatment plant. I am assuming that is exactly what power stations do, rather than slurping water from the local water authority.
Google is a publicly traded company. (Score:2)
Something fishy. Or just corrupt going on here.
Volkswagen loves this! (Score:1)
Streisand Effect? (Score:1)
How about the adage that the cover-up is worse than the crime?
Or this chestnut: "Don't be evil"?
No?
Well I'll be (Score:2)