Comment by adrr
2 days ago
Biggest alarmist is movement against Nestle using water for bottled water in California. They don’t even use as much as an average golf course.
How much water is wasted on golf courses in these arid regions? Or growing water intensive crops like alfalfa that isn’t even directly used to feed people.
Yep, 1.6 trillion gallons of water from the Colorado river goes into irrigation for alfalfa[1]. Google's total water consumption across all data centers in 2023 was 6.4 billion gallons[2].
People are sounding the alarm about water usage in AI data centers while ignoring the real unsustainable industries like animal agriculture.
1: https://coloradosun.com/2024/04/04/research-colorado-river-w...
2: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-emissions-...
Talking about wasteful. There 16,000 golf courses that use 312,000 gallons a day[1]. Thats 1.82 trillion gallons annually. Only 28 million people play golf course on a course. Google's MAU is 90%+ of US population, beef or milk consumptions i would guess that 90% of population consumes it at least once a month. We're focusing on things that everyone uses but the things that less than 10% of the populations partake in. Why do we have golf courses in arid regions that have severe water shortages? Before places like LA county spends $8 billion on a toilet to tap system[2], maybe shut down the golf courses first.
1. https://www.npr.org/2008/06/11/91363837/water-thirsty-golf-c...
2. https://www.mwdh2o.com/building-local-supplies/pure-water-so...
I'm mildly surprised that almost 10% of the US golfs. That makes the 0.3% of water usage from TFA seem less bad.
It’s a great example of using large numbers without context to scare people.
Say “6.4 billion gallons” in isolation and people will be horrified. Put it in context relative to something like alfalfa farming and it doesn’t even appear on the same scale.
Absolutely, not to mention the difficulty people have in grasping the difference between a billion and a trillion.
5 replies →
I understand it takes a gallon of water to grow one almond in California.
1 reply →
And most of that alfalfa is owned by a Saudi conglomerate that then exports it to the other side of the planet to feed its dairy cattle
You pay for fuel for your car => Saudi monarchy gets it share because they supply it => while they completely waste 20% for “supercars” and vanity, they still have enough money to do whatever they want including => they grow alfalfa next to you to feed their local cattle
You are overlooking location. The ideal place to grow crops is a place with great soil, good weather, a long growing season, and abundant water, but there aren't a lot of those. Of those four things, water is the only one that can be reasonably transported.
Data centers have fewer constraints. It should be possible to place more or all of them in places where water is abundant.
My comment was just focused on total water use. I agree that location does matter, and that data centers should be placed where water is abundant.
It still doesn't change my concern about how unsustainable growing alfalfa is. Trillions of gallons to grow an inefficient animal feed crop while we're told by the evening news to take shorter showers (8 minute shower is ~16 gallons of water) and let our lawns die.
You are overlooking location. The ideal place to place a datacenter is a place with cheap land, cheap electricity, good backbone connectivity, and close to users, but there aren't a lot of those.
Solar powered desalination seems like a no brainer in places like California.
Vastly cheaper to just have an efficient water market. But the current system makes farmer either use their water allocations for agriculture or not have that water at all.
Desalination can be ecologically disastrous. You have to put all that salt somewhere (and it's a lot).
1 reply →
Water is not evenly distributed.aData centers are not bieng located where there is excess water, they are bieng located in areas where they have access to the critical infrastucture they need,and the use of domestic potable water supplys to cool there operations is done as it reduces there land and infrastructure requirements, is quick, and they care nothing about the costs of electricity and water, while they drive up costs for the people who live in the surounding areas. People NEED water, data does not. People NEED agriculture, they do not NEED data. conflating the water uses of things to people is false.
I remember doing the calculations on the Nestle plant that caused a big storm a few years ago. The plant sat on several acres of land, which if converted into an alfalfa farm, would have consumed the same amount of water. The surrounding area was littered with alfalfa farms so it wasn't an unfair comparison. Meanwhile that bottling plant employs dozens of people, far more then a farm would have.
There are a lot of historical reasons for people to be angry at Nestle, aside from their impact on water.
It's become a meme, or a badge to display your tribal affiliation, to be mad at Nestle. Monsanto is another example of this phenomenon.
nit: Nestle sold off it's water brands in 2021 to a private equity group.[0][1]
0 - https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2025/05/09/nestle-to-s... 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l2Bas81NDY
Right cause we have all gone and measured truth. Not just read possibly biased information off a screen.
Asimov wrote about this in Foundation. If you are not checking yourself it's blind faith in inherently self selecting dishonest people
Many golf courses in arid regions are on greywater.
That could be used as potable water again. Orange county,CA injects treated waste water back into the aquifer then pumps back out for water.
https://www.ocwd.com/gwrs
Orange county CA also irrigates its golf courses with its greywater.
Why is water used for golf a waste vs other uses?
From an utilitarian point of view golf courses use a lot of water per person playing.
the parent poster's using a sort of morality argument to call water usage they dont/cant benefit from as wastage.
The issue with Nestle is that they are paying pennies on the dollar compared to the public because "muh job creation" or something to that effect.
> How much water is wasted on golf courses...
Zero. You can't waste water, it goes in a cycle.
I mean unless you transport it off-planet.
You can waste the energy you spent cleaning it and pumping it around. But between nuclear and solar we ought to have an overabundance of that.
In a market economy, if it becomes "economically infeasible" to purify used water, the price goes up slightly, and suddenly it makes a lot more sense to treat dirty water, or even seawater.
You see the same type of argument against oil or mineral use; the idea that we'll run out. But people who argue we'll run out almost always look at confirmed reserves that are economical to extract right now. When prices rise, this sends a signal to prospectors and miners to go look for more, and it also makes far more reserves economical.
For example, Alberta's oil sands were never counted as oil reserves in bygone decades, because mining it made no sense at the time. But the economy grew per capita and overall, prices rose, and suddenly Canada is an oil-rich nation.
A similar dynamic applies to water and everything else.
Of course there are finite amounts of oil and uranium and so on, but the amounts just on this one planet are absolutely mind-boggling. The Earth has a radius of 6400km, and our deepest mines are 3-4km. We may expect richer mineral deposits (not oil) as we go further down.
Keep following this price logic and at a certain point it'll make sense to mine the far side of the moon, the asteroid belt, and so on ad infinitum.
> Zero. You can't waste water, it goes in a cycle.
You can waste water because not all water sources are equally renewable. Some underground aquifers recharge slower than we extract from them.
You are not technically wrong, but you are economically wrong.
The water cycle _could_ require spending grid energy to filter/pump water into an economically usable state. Instead if water was better managed, we would not need to build additional grid capacity for water management.
Your argument basically boils down to "If energy was unlimited, we could be wasteful!", which, again, is technically true, but ignores the economic reality.
And we couldn’t anyway because we’d bake the surface of the planet with all the waste heat from that free energy.
4 replies →
Water used for nuclear reactor cooling can only be returned to the environment if its temperature is within 0.5 deg F of the local source temperature. I live near a facility that is on the river with several man made cooling lakes. During the winter, there is constant fog and ice by the roads. So much so, that the road to the facility itself has covered bridge crossing one of the lakes.
During drought, the capacity of the plant is reduced due to lack of cooling capacity.
And remember, the reactor is used to generate high pressure steam which produces electricity, hot water and low grade steam. Even with high efficiency gas turbines and heat integration, there is a significant amount of steam that needs to be condensed before it can be feed back into the reactor.
That’s a fake constraint though. If there was any actual shortage people would use it immediately.
Temperature controls gate returning to env.
Fresh water in a reservoir above a water treatment plant is not the same as salt water in the ocean even if it's the same molecule in the same cycle.
If it's the same molecule but downhill and mixed in with some other ones, it's just x number of joules and y number of dollars' worth of infrastructure away from being among its own kind and uphill from your tap again.
We get blasted with an uncountable number of these joules from above (the sun) and below (nuclear). Our economy is generating an exponentially increasing number of dollars.
I understand wanting to be careful with resources, but not to the point where frugality becomes a goal in and of itself.
6 replies →