Comment by legitster
9 hours ago
> Using the prompt, “How much water is likely to evaporate from data centers in California per year, assuming they are all using mostly evaporative cooling?” several free AI websites provided ranges of estimates, below. These AI also can provide ranges and sources for calculation assumptions.
Data centers with closed loop cooling systems are absolutely built all of the time. Total evaporative cooling has the advantage of being more power efficient (and therefor cheaper) - the only reason they bother with total evap is because the water is being offered plentifully and cheap.
People have no reality of how cheaply priced industrial water is in this country. My parents had a cherry orchard and their annual water bill was $100 an acre per year for as much as they wanted. Which is why the water consumption for data centers is only still a fraction of what we lose to evaporation from inefficient spray irrigation.
Yeah, there are alfalfa fields in central Arizona. Alfalfa basically turns water and sunlight into cellulose about as quickly as plants can.
Worse, the owners of those fields are often foreign companies. That means they use tremendous amounts of water in one of the driest regions on earth, in the middle of a multiple decade drought, and the wealth these farms generate disappears overseas.
Part of the issue is not systematically using a pricing structure that charges disproportionately more for usage above high thresholds.
The 101-level "solution" is to just raise the price to account for demand. The problem with that is that it treats all usage the same, whether it's a residence's first gallon or an alfalfa field's last gallon. But the former is something we need to protect.
It makes sense to price water, and electricity, in a fashion where the first X costs a certain amount, and the next X has a higher rate, and above some percentile of usage it has a much higher rate, and at some percentile of usage, customers should be very nearly paying for new required utility infrastructure themselves. That allows using pricing to solve supply problems, without penalizing normal levels of usage.
Some utilities already do this. But if there are actual issues with having enough supply for both datacenters/farms/smelters/etc and residential usage, then they're not doing this well enough, or don't have the pricing correct.
This causes major market distortions and worse outcomes than the econ 101 solution.
The problem is that water isn't traded on a normal market at all. Lots of people have historical water rights and pay nearly nothing for their water use. There's byzantine regulation and many have the right to use for some purpose on their land but not to resell, so the market cannot allocate to more efficient use.
If you just let the 101 level solution actually work, water prices will rise until inefficient uses like water-intensive agriculture (not even all crops!) are pushed out. Urban users easily outbid almost all agricultural use, even at what any person would consider dirt cheap prices. For example, desalinated water, which is considered expensive for agriculture, can be 40 cents per cubic meter of water. That's a lot of water! Usually the last mile of urban water delivery costs more than that.
The amount required to satisfy all urban use, including water hungry lawns etc, and datacenters, corresponds to a very minor reduction in agriculture. Perhaps even just changing which crop is grown or switching irrigation techniques.
Charging more to higher users, price discrimination, causes several problems. First, it creates an incentive to cheat. I'm not using all this water myself, its for this whole group of people who "live" here. Don't allow this kind of spreading (somehow...)? Now you actually screw any business or institution that serves a lot of people. A farm produces food for thousands- do they count as one user? A park uses much more water than a garden but serves many more people. Whatever framework you create will require another bureaucracy to run. Lobbyists will find or insert loopholes for their friends.
The heavy users actually improve the system robustness, in both electricity and water. Their higher demand pays for more supply infrastructure, which itself often benefits from economies of scale, and in a shortage they may even be more responsive to price increases due to their high use.
I disagree. A large part of the cost of a utility is fixed per customer. Or any product really. That's how bulk purchasing makes sense. I can get 4x the product at a bulk store for 2x the price. Instead of being prejudicial about the use case, let's just charge what the utility actually costs. Include capital, operation, and decommissioning costs. That way, if you get a sudden spike in demand, you have the cash flow to issue a bond a scale up.
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> Part of the issue is not systematically using a pricing structure that charges disproportionately more for usage above high thresholds.
We don't do this for gasoline (in most countries), even though it is also vital for life. And yet people can still drive, afford to eat food grown with fertilizers, use plastic, and so on.
Turns out markets are pretty good when you leave them alone. But when they're not left alone (as is the case with water today!!) you get some weird shit.
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I think it’s a good thing when non-americans want to invest in businesses that operate in america. They’ll use that investment to hire americans and produce goods that are sold to americans. I’m sure american capitalists would love to be the only ones allowed to invest here, as they would be able to get more equity for their capital, but it’s not good for anyone else and not really even good for them long term. Smart countries try to attract foreign investment, not scare it away
How is it legal? Shouldn’t water be the most regulated (as in protected) substance of all?
It's quite regulated in the western US, but usually in the direction of guaranteeing water to incumbent landowners. Some people end up with really strong water rights, and they can be wasteful if the law helps them do so.
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Regulation is not necessarily the same as protecting; as other commenters state the specific regulations around agricultural water use in the drier western united states often encourage wasteful agricultural uses of water.
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I don't know the exact situation described above, but water rights are often linked to property rights, and those are regularly treated as sacred. It doesn't matter if the owners are foreigners and the law is outdated. And those with land often have more money and power than the small government with jurisdiction, assuming the lobbyists haven't taken control of the latter.
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> are often foreign companies
That have _themselves_ banned Alfalfa farming; because, of the water impact.
But at least that alfalfa gobbles up CO2 from the air.
Until people/animals eat it, or it decomposes. Not saying this like we should ignore the co2 impact from data centers, but biomass is a pretty poor co2 absorber unless its cyano and falls to the ocean floor before decomposing
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Goes into cow, comes out as methane. cow dies/meat --> co2. All the fossil fuel transportation for alfalfa to cow to brisket --> co2. Lot more co2 generated than absorbed.
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> People have no reality of how cheaply priced industrial water is in this country.
Driving between SF and LA, you see a gazillion signs from water leeches complaining that the government won't give them yet more nearly-free water. No, I don't want to go without fresh crops. But yes, I absolutely believe that, say, growing almonds in basically a desert should be a financially expensive operation, and if that makes the end result more expensive, then so be it. And if that means it's no longer viable to empty rivers for the sake of a tasty bag of snack nuts, I can learn to live with it.
exactly! LA is peak capitalism over the environment. the amount of ecosystems destroyed by Los Angeles’s insatiable thirst for water is impressive
This is a really awkward situation because while we'd really want the market to sort of auto-balance the costs between different suppliers it's also really hard to look at PE ratios right now and believe that the market is anywhere near sane. OpenAI could trivially monopolize the water supply in CA[1] with its current warchest and that would, for everyone, be terrible in some fundamentally obvious ways - so we've clearly got a pretty gigantic misalignment in the market which means we're reliant on the government specifically picking winners but ideally doing so in a sensible manner.
How many well cooked dinners is a prompt worth? Not nearly as many as the market currently says. If it were anything less vital we could probably just ride it out until the bubble bursts but if acceleration continues then in time water usage might actually rise to the levels that the most fear mongering folks are saying it's at.
1. Accidentally even - without even reaching into the realm of malicious intent.
Also just because something is cheap doesn't mean it's not depleting resources and making life worse for a community somewhere. People are constantly trying to build pipelines to the west to deplete the great lakes. There is a societal and ecological limit and these AI companies are not worth it.
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