Comment by LPisGood
6 months ago
What does it mean to “use” water? In agriculture and in data centers my understanding is that water will go back to the sky and then rain down again. It’s not gone, so at most we’re losing the energy cost to process that water.
The problem is that you take the water from the ground, and you let it evaporate, and then it returns to... Well to various places, including the ground, but the deeper you take the water from (drinking water can't be taken from the surface, and for technological reasons drinking water is used too) the more time it takes to replenish the aquifer - up to thousands of years!
Of course surface water availability can also be a serious problem.
So with the water used in datacenters. It's just a cooling loop, the output is hot water.
and water from datacenters goes where...? just disappears?
No it’s largely the same situation I think. I was drawing a distinction between agricultural use and maybe some more heavy industrial uses while the water is polluted or otherwise rendered permanently unfit for other uses.