this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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We don’t know how much water data centers use. We just know it’s a lot

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Why would a data center need to continously consume water to cool itself? Leaks?

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Evaporative cooling systems, such as cooling towers, so that water is non-recoverable.

The article however is mentioning that 3/4 of the water use cited is indirect through power generation.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Didn't know those were a thing

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Water is extremely important in most large scale cooling systems, whether it be swamp coolers (aka evaporative cooling) or traditional HVAC (aka chillers).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That water will be recovered as rain.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But probably will end in ocean

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

And evaporate to become rain again and again.

[–] kn33 13 points 1 year ago

I mean, sure, but that's not ideal for us

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

It will rain somewhere. Generally places that already have rain. If you're counting global amount, we have plenty of fresh water, but we don't have it in the places where we need it.

[–] NOT_RICK 8 points 1 year ago

That can still turn into a local deficit in areas with little rainfall

[–] TenderfootGungi 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Evaporative coolers are cheap. It can be done with non-evaporative coolers, but is far more expensive to build.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Not to mention a much higher carbon footprint.

The reason evaporative coolers are cheap is because they use a fraction of the electricity that chillers do.

And note that the majority of data center water usage is indirect via power generation, so using less water on site but more indirectly by consuming more power is both more expensive and less efficient.

Unfortunately, evaporative coolers are the best way to go, for now.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

When calculating water use, it's important to not only look at the water used directly to cool data centers, but also at the water used by power plants to generate that 205TWh.

The researchers also tracked the water used by wastewater treatment plants due to data centers, as well as the water used by power plants to power that portion of the wastewater treatment site's workload.

[–] s38b35M5 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

From Google's blog:

Last year, our global data center fleet consumed approximately 4.3 billion gallons of water. This is comparable to the water needed to irrigate and maintain 29 golf courses in the southwest U.S. each year.

From the WaPo article:

A large data center, researchers say, can gobble up anywhere between 1 million and 5 million gallons of water a day — as much as a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They compare it to residential use and I wonder if they add all those sources for that when comparing?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

For California at least, residential use is about 10% of all water usage iirc. So if data centers are dwarfed by that...not a big concern in the big picture.

The issue I guess is when data center usage sucks up all the local supply. State and region wide they don't use much but they do use a lot in one small area.