Comment by deckar01
4 hours ago
Are you regularly filling Olympic sized pools and checking the water usage of an entire town in Nebraska? I would rather see this put into context by comparing it to other businesses normalized by power usage or square footage.
Nebraska's main product is corn. Irrigated corn takes roughly 2 acre-feet of water, so the total DC water usage in the article (765M gallon) could irrigate 1k acres of corn. That's a single average-sized farm, not even a big operation. Calling a rounding error might be too generous.
No, I'm not checking the water usage of Olympic swimming pools, because I intuitively understand that they are not meaningful users of water.
I can see how a 0.27% increase in Lincoln’s water usage intuitively seems insignificant, but that was a a low usage data center in a large city. Papillion has 1/12 of Lincoln’s population, yet it’s data center used 42x more water. Assuming water usage was proportional to population it would have increased the city’s water usage ~136%.
It doesn't seem insignificant. It is in fact insignificant. And it supports one of the most popular and widely used consumer products of the last 100 years, so it seems like a pretty incredible bargain.
1 reply →
>they are not meaningful users of water.
How so? NOT COUNTING leaks and filling, the average Olympic sized swimming pool uses 1-2 million gallons of water a year.
See EPA Commercial Pooland Spa Equipment Best Management Practices for Commercial and Institutional Facilities https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2023-11/ws-commer...
Yes. GP is literally saying that 1-2 million gallons of water is a pretty small number not meaningful to anything at scale.
It's basically like framing power consumption in watt hours. A million watt hours is tiny at any scale, your whole neighborhood uses millions every day.
Please compare 1 million gallons to the 1 quadrillion gallons in the aquifer, or the 31 trillion that falls from sky each year in Nebraska and get back to me.
Different state, but: almond trees growing in California consume 1 trillion gallons a year (estimated).
So probably we could grow fewer almonds in California.
How do you get the California water to this datacenter?
In other words, water scarcity is a distribution problem, not a globally finite resource problem.