The West's Drought Could Bring About a Data Center Reckoning (protocol.com) 141
When it comes to water use, data centers are the tech industry's secret water hogs -- and they could soon come under increased scrutiny. From a report: The West is parched, and getting more so by the day. Lake Mead -- the country's largest reservoir -- is nearing "dead pool" levels, meaning it may soon be too low to flow downstream. The entirety of the Four Corners plus California is mired in megadrought. Amid this desiccation, hundreds of the country's data centers use vast amounts of water to hum along. Dozens cluster around major metro centers, including those with mandatory or voluntary water restrictions in place to curtail residential and agricultural use.
Exactly how much water, however, is an open question given that many companies don't track it, much less report it. While their energy use and accompanying emissions have made more headlines, data centers' water usage is coming under increasing scrutiny. And as climate change makes water more scarce, pressure could grow on hyperscale data centers to disclose their water use and factor scarcity into where and how they operate. Centers consume water both directly (for liquid cooling) and indirectly (for non-renewable electricity generation). Roughly one-fifth of the data center servers in the U.S. source water directly from moderately to highly water-stressed watersheds, according to a 2021 analysis published in Environmental Research Letters.
Exactly how much water, however, is an open question given that many companies don't track it, much less report it. While their energy use and accompanying emissions have made more headlines, data centers' water usage is coming under increasing scrutiny. And as climate change makes water more scarce, pressure could grow on hyperscale data centers to disclose their water use and factor scarcity into where and how they operate. Centers consume water both directly (for liquid cooling) and indirectly (for non-renewable electricity generation). Roughly one-fifth of the data center servers in the U.S. source water directly from moderately to highly water-stressed watersheds, according to a 2021 analysis published in Environmental Research Letters.
Data centers using water (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah yes, datacenters are the water hogs.
It's not all those golf fields or green lawns.
No, it's gotta be those damn datacenters!!!
Re: (Score:2)
Seriously, this is as stupid as saying cars are causing drought because you need to fill your radiator with water and anti-freeze every four years.
Re:Data centers using water (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry, but you are clueless.
Switch in Las Vegas, as an example, uses significant amounts of water for their cooling towers. They function on evaporation, as the ambient temperature is not conducive to DX cooling. The low humidity (high evaporation rates) is why they have had a competitive cost advantage despite the stupid heat. Beyond cooling towers, many use indirect evaporative air coolers and other evaporative cooling systems.
As a rough order of magnitude, a data center will typically evaporate 1GPM per kW of critical load. When you are talking about over 100MW, it is roughly the equivalent of 700,000 homes.
Re:Data centers using water (Score:5, Informative)
If it were just water being used as a working fluid in heat exchange loops there would still be some consumption; any 'closed loop' of sufficient size is only mostly closed(and water that has been shot full of enough biocides and anticorrosion additives to be used in a coolant loop isn't exactly ready to be reintroduced to society without processing); but it would be vastly less than the actual situation; which is water being used as a sacrificial evaporative coolant.
Re: (Score:3)
You're generalizing from one example. Few data centers use evaporative cooling -- most are located in areas where the ambient humidity is not conducive to it. The vast majority of data centers use as much water in the restroom as they do elsewhere in the facility.
Granted, the data centers that do use evaporative cooling tend to stress the water supply in their areas. After all, they're located in deserts where there isn't a lot of water available to begin with. As rationing begins, they may find themselves
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, but they're generalizing based on the headline "The West's Drought Could Bring About a Data Center Reckoning" which kinda implies that they're talking about evaporative cooling in an already water-stressed Western desert
Re: (Score:2)
The West is a big place including population centers like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Portland. None of those areas is suitable for evaporative cooling.
The data centers up the Columbia river from Portland actually do pretty well with free-air cooling. It just rarely gets hot enough to be a problem. And that hydro power is nice too.
Re: (Score:3)
Indeed. Most will use some kind of flow or air cooling. Evaporative cooling is only viable for large installations, and it only uses about 1l per kWh. Compared to agriculture, it is really not a big amount of water.
Re: (Score:2)
Switch in Las Vegas, as an example, uses significant amounts of water for their cooling towers. They function on evaporation, as the ambient temperature is not conducive to DX cooling.
It happens that right now I'm in Reno for a conference, one item on the agenda of which will be a visit to the Switch Datacenter there. I will check on the cooling situation.
Re: (Score:3)
But that water could simply be condenser and either reused or streamed down again
That's genius: You have too much heat, so evaporate water to cool it. But now you need the water back, so build a condenser to collect it.
Hmm... But condensers emit massive amounts of heat that needs to be removed. What to do?
I know: We'll add another evaporative cooler to remove the heat!
Information-free article [Re:Data centers usin...] (Score:2)
Right? Bullshit article. No facts, no figures.
I agree; the article has no content.
For all I know data centers may indeed use a lot of water, but the article doesn't give any information to support that claim. It very much depends on how they use the water.
Re: (Score:3)
First off, Data centers use glycol mixed cooling fluid, not just water. That water does not evaporate. It runs in a loop between a heat exchanger and a chiller, over and over and over again for years without needing to be changed out.
And what do you think a heat exchanger or a chiller uses? Water. While the closed loop makes contact with the servers may use another liquid besides water, the other loop uses water. Also that only applies to data centers that use liquid cooling. Many data centers use air cooling for their servers which relies on cooling towers which use water.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And they're improving almond water use. Water shortages is a good enough incentive that many farmers are modernizing their 60s era irrigation.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
This is insane.
John Oliver touched it last week:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
It is not about "water" being lost. It is infinitely recyclable. It is more the loss of ground water that is collected over literal millions of years.
Nobody* tries to recycle their water. Take as much as you want from the ground, and dump it to the oceans... What could possibly go wrong?
(Goes to YouTube to laugh at sinkhole videos).
alfalfa or data centers (Score:2)
Alfalfa or data centers. We are going to have to choose.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Almonds. Inflammatory, low nutrient density, a bigger water hog (just) than alfalfa and covers half of California.
Re:alfalfa or data centers (Score:5, Insightful)
Almonds are certainly representative of just how wasteful the US is in water usage. Obviously there are many contributors, but Southern California's agricultural industry is a pretty good example of why building vast farms in arid and semi-arid areas is, in the long term, completely unsustainable. And before someone mentions desalinization, to do it at the levels necessary to replace the collapse in fresh water reserves would a) be unbelievably energy-intensive (in other words, really f---ing expensive) and b) lead to mountains of salt that if dumped in the Pacific Ocean would only make marine ecosystem problems off the coast of California even worse. At some point everyone is just going to have to give up on the idea of Southern California as a major agricultural producer and let the region turn back into what it was once. But I'm sure before that happens they'll drain every once of water out of reservoirs and aquifers, try to convince Congress to seize the Columbia River, completely poison the Pacific coastal waters with nitrates, and make sure the region is poisoned on the same order the ancient Sumerians and Akkadians rendered vast swathes of the Fertile Crescent a few thousand years ago.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Humans are incredibly bad at long term thinking, and thus just foist it on to their much poorer descendants to clean up the mess.
It's completely sustainable (Score:3)
If California runs dry it will not end well. There'll be massive food shortages. Everyone focuses on Almonds and Alfalfa because they're distractions. They're put there by people who don't want to pay the taxes to solve the water crisis. They tell you that so you'll put it out of your mind believing (wrongly) that all we need to do is give up almonds and foofy salads.
Swamp plants in a desert. Also, less than 1% (Score:4, Insightful)
> California produces large amounts of the world's rice and beans.
Just curious whether the see the issue with growing a swamp plant in the desert. Rice is a swamp plant, grown in the Louisiana and Texas coasts, and along the Mississippi.
California has been on a major expansion of rice growing since 2006. It's now up to almost 20% of US production. Which makes it 0.4% of world production. That's your "large amounts of the world's rice" - less than half of one percent. Everyone is going to starve if California, which produces 0.4% of the rice, switches to more appropriate crops like tomatoes, peppers, corn, etc, right?
California's soil is pretty great (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
almonds actually made up approximately 13 percent of California's total irrigated farmland and used less than nine percent of the state's agricultural (not total) water.
https://farmtogether.com/learn... [farmtogether.com]
I hate when someone hears the easy to remember, "One almond takes one gallon water" statement and then assumes it means something it doesn't (almonds take too much water). Almonds, by weight and nutrients, are no worse than any other nut or agricultural product, and it takes HALF the water that beef production takes.
Re: (Score:2)
I hate when someone hears the easy to remember, "One almond takes one gallon water" statement and then assumes it means something it doesn't (almonds take too much water). Almonds, by weight and nutrients, are no worse than any other nut or agricultural product, and it takes HALF the water that beef production takes.
Hardly an apples-to-apples (nuts to nuts?) comparison. Cows, raised properly, eat grass on otherwise un-farmable land, that gets watered from the sky. The nutrient density of beef is off the car
Re:alfalfa or data centers (Score:4, Interesting)
No, cows do not just eat for free off of grass. Do you know what crop is the single biggest user of water in California? Alfalfa, most of which goes to feeding livestock.
Growing hay and other forage and irrigating pasture for livestock (mainly cattle) takes at least 10 million acre-feet of water in an average year, or more than 20 percent of the water used in California.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2015-05-26/why-they-grow-thirsty-alfalfa-in-parched-california
Re: (Score:2)
> Alfalfa, most of which goes to feeding livestock.
Which is a problem. Grass fed only cows have much healthier fat profiles for human consumption and when eating grass, they have an effectively 0 carbon and water footprint and provide lots of ground fertilizations. Feeding alfalfa as part of an intensive beef farming is enormously harmful to the environment.
Re:alfalfa or data centers (Score:5, Informative)
Not exactly. Its really close though.
The analysis ranked pasture first among California's top 10 most water-intensive crops, in some cases grouped by categories (in average acre feet of water applied per acre in one growing season), followed by nuts and alfalfa:
Pasture (clover, rye, bermuda and other grasses), 4.92 acre feet per acre
Almonds and pistachios, 4.49 acre feet per acre
Alfalfa, 4.48 acre feet per acre
Citrus and subtropical fruits (grapefruit, lemons, oranges, dates, avocados, olives, jojoba), 4.23 acre feet per acre
Sugar beets, 3.89 acre feet per acre
Other deciduous fruits (applies, apricots, walnuts, cherries, peaches, nectarines, pears, plums, prunes, figs, kiwis), 3.7 acre feet per acre
Cotton, 3.67 acre feet per acre
Onions and garlic, 2.96 acre feet per acre
Potatoes, 2.9 acre feet per acre
Vineyards (table, raisin and wine grapes), 2.85 acre feet per acre
https://www.pressdemocrat.com/... [pressdemocrat.com]
Re: (Score:2)
https://ucmanagedrought.ucdavi... [ucdavis.edu]
it's america (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:it's america (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
It's worth mentioning that the places running out of water do typically vote blue. The problem here is that the Democrats pay a lot of lip service to environmental issues, but when the rubber hits the road they're still just corporatist sellouts. Culture war issues really are the only thing that our two political parties will actually take any action over.
Abortion? Sure. LGBTQ+ rights? You bet. Racial issues? Uh-huh.
What about the housing shortage? *crickets* Taking on the for-profit healthcare ind
Re: (Score:2)
You missed a beat there. "Taking on the for-profit healthcare industry? We'll mandate that everyone has to pay in, or pay a fine. There, we fixed it!" -- that's a bit more accurate.
Re: (Score:3)
Hmm, four corners region of the west is quite red most of the time. Ie, Arizona is so solidly red that they're still investigating the 2020 election. Utah is solidly red, though some think their liberal sellouts because the devout Mormons dislike Trump's hedonistic lifestyle and didn't vote for him in bulk. New Mexico and Colorodo are a mix of blue and red, but the red areas in those states are being hurt badlly by the drought.
Re: (Score:2)
So let them play golf on sand courses.
(Only recently discovered that such golf courses exist, but I can't see why playing golf on dirt would differ much from playing on grass.)
Re: (Score:2)
You might actually want to read up on the subject. Here's a snippet that you will probably agree with:
First and foremost to CRT legal scholars in 1993 was their "discontent" with the way in which liberalism addressed race issues in the U.S. They critiqued "liberal jurisprudence", including affirmative action,[44] color-blindness, role modeling, and the merit principle.[45] Specifically, they claimed that the liberal concept of value-neutral law contributed to maintenance of the U.S.'s racially unjust social
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
He wasn’t blaming them, he was saying your party is courting just 0.01% and 3-7% of the population to vote for them (the broader LGBTQ crowd) while ignoring the popular vote.
His party (the Clinton’s 90s populist Democrats) promised change with their unrealized climate goals, he wants them to come back to make more promises.
Meanwhile both of you are blaming a party that hasn’t realistically been in charge in California for at least half a century.
Re: (Score:2)
Well SCOTUS has thrown it back at Congress, and with the filibuster largely intact, this Congress isn't going to do a damned thing. And with the growing likelihood of Congress flipping in November, nothing will happen then either. This isn't a "we're targeting a small demographic to no effect" problem, it's an "the fossil fuel industry is a powerful and wealthy lobby group with a vested interested in short term profits" problem. Fixing the problem in any meaningful way would require a whole lot of Congressc
Re: (Score:2)
Greed wins every time.
That's one way to put it. It's the why and how of solving the problem.
On one side are the ignoramuses that believe we can get all the energy we need from solar PV and batteries, a solution that they claim is cheaper than coal. If that's true then we solved the problem of global warming and where the USA will get the energy it needs. Other nations around the world will be fucked though, because they have too much energy demand and not enough land area to collect enough sunlight. Here's a graph to put tha
Re: (Score:2)
The largest obstacle has been the Democrat party.
I'm afraid you're only partially correct.
Um... we've been able to get all energy (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Well SCOTUS has thrown it back at Congress...
The SCOTUS legalized bribing politicians, calling it speech. The SCOTUS upheld partisan and racial gerrymanders, locking in structural advantages to one party, distorting the makeup of State legislatures and Congress.The SCOTUS declared corporations are "people" even though there were no corporations when the Constitution was written. The SCOTUS knows 100% that a bribed and gerrymandered congress is incapable of governing effectively, since representatives are more concerned about raising money (collecting
To be fair we could solve all of that in a month (Score:2)
SCOTUS didn't throw it to Congress (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I live in a one party state, it's Washington. And yes it does suck.
I think you completely misread my post (Score:2, Troll)
Re: (Score:2)
A shrinking demographic gets scared, the Great Replacement Theory gets pulled out of storage, and thus any infamous or awful acts the group commits can be forgiven or justified, because they're under threat.
Re: (Score:3)
The problem goes much deeper.
As I see it, the political situation here has been reduced to "Team Red" versus "Team Blue" because both sides have done so much gerrymandering and rigging the system that it's all but impossible for anyone to get on the ballot, much less elected, without support from one side or the other.
As a result, nobody from either side can be seen to cooperate with the other for fear of alienating their base and being replaced with someone who will toe the Party Line.
Citizens therefore a
It was first past the post voting that did it (Score:2)
Unless and until we do away with 1st past the post voting our choices are 1 party or 2 party rule. Right now seem to be leaning towards 1 party with Team Red owning everything. Kinda like China but with slightly different speeches from our dictator
Re: (Score:2)
Considering how much money is in golfing, calling it a "gold course" is still accurate.
stupid question (Score:3, Insightful)
So this is probably a stupid question, but how are data centers "using" ie actually consuming water?
Obviously they 'use' it for cooling but isn't it more or less directly returned to the source with some degrees of heat added?
To me that's not really 'consuming' water? It's shuffling it around and putting it back.
Even if it came back out of their system ridiculously hot say 95C, it's a pretty simple mechanical thing to have the returns fountain/spray, etc where the temp nearly normalizes to the environment at almost no cost.
Re: stupid question (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Smart design helps. Ages ago I did medical center IT and the way we cooled was to take 45-50 degree street water first into the data center, then send 50-55 degree water to the faucets and kitchens and showers. Maybe 60F on a really hot day. It was bone-chilling cold in there.
Cities could do the same thing but incentives are all wrong.
Also don't build your data center in a hot desert.
Re: stupid question (Score:4, Informative)
Yea, and when they do this it's not part of the evaporative loop.
The water to which they supplement with anti-oxidizing agents is circulated from the AC units to the external coolers over and over and over for years upon years.
Think of it like your car. You car has a water loop. And to that they added a bunch of chemicals to prevent it from freezing in the winter, and to help reduce corrosion of the components it comes in contact with. But in the lifetime of your car you might flush the engine coolants 3-4 times.
If you wanted to make heat loss a little more efficient, you could install a 2nd "clean water" tank, and a spray nozzle that pointed at your radiator. Then, when your engine was hot, that nozzle would come on and mist the radiator. When that water evaporated it would take a lot more heat away than just plain air. But that water isn't treated past being filtered.
This 2nd water usage is what this article is pointing at as the "waste of water." The water that is run across the external cooling coils, to be evaporated to increase the amount of heat a smaller radiator can remove from the inner water loop (that stays the same water for years and years on end).
Could they install larger air coolers? Maybe. ... it does rain out ... somewhere ...
Could they recycle the water they run over them for evaporative cooling? Well
BTW: Evaporative cooling is common on pretty much any building of scale. Your large commercial office buildings likely use an evaporative cooler as well. Hospitals. Large hotels.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
https://www.datacenterknowledg... [datacenterknowledge.com]
Re: stupid question (Score:2)
So this is probably a stupid question, but how are data centers "using" ie actually consuming water?
Evaporative cooling towers. There is a cooling loop that extracts heat from the inside air using water. And then the hot water is sprayed down through a "cooling tower". Evaporation cools the water that is collected and re-used at the bottom. But that evaporation has to be replenished from a fresh wster source.
It doesn't work so well in high humidity environments. But in dry areas, it is competitive with mechanical refrigeration cycles.
Two things (Score:2)
Even the ones that don't often don't recycle the water. To do that you have to cool that water, so some of them flush it after a while as waste water. Yes, waste water can be used, but it means you're still losing drinking & farming water, which is by far the most valuable.
Re: (Score:2)
This article is bogus
Article is Muckracking and Yellow Journalism.
The press has no shortage of targets. To me, the observer, it seems they're in cahoots with the current (p)resident of 1600 Penn. Av. to see who can destroy the most of the USA in the shortest time.
And rubes eat it all up. And those rubes vote and elect.
"If you don't read the papers you're uninformed, if you read the papers you're misinformed." -- Mark Twain
Re: (Score:2)
Except the increasing use of cooling towers, which boils it off, which provides cooling for "free".
Re: (Score:3)
Datacenters do not cool like a nuclear power plant where they pull from a river and use the cold water to cool down steam loops. They use water like your car. They have a chiller and a heat exchanger that runs water in a loop. No. This article is bogus.
Stop trying to sound like such a smart contrary cunt. They use evaporative cooling.
https://www.munters.com/en-us/... [munters.com]
https://www.colocationamerica.... [colocationamerica.com]
It's crazy that nobody but Gavin Newsom (Score:5, Insightful)
People are going to start leaving when they can't water their lawns or even take showers daily. And that means they'll pile into the rest of the country, driving up cost of living there. If you're in the SW you want to fix this so you have water. If you're not you want to fix this so you don't have millions of water refugees in your state making a gallon of milk $15.
And yet here we are, doing fuck all, worrying about woke trans critical race whatever distraction is popular this week. The real problem is folks vote with their gut instead of their wallets. And that's brought our gov't to a halt. And make no mistake, this is too big a problem and the profits aren't large enough (there's more money to be made controlling dwindling water supplies than making more water) for anyone but the gov't to solve this.
Re: (Score:2)
Politicians these days listen to the people making the loudest noises on social media and in street demonstrations who probably represent a fraction of a percent of the views of the population at large who don't have time to shriek and wave idiotic slogan banners around for hours like the teens and early 20 somethings with close to zero life experience who do.
Re: (Score:2)
As a first step, we could let agriculture pay something closer to a real market price for water, since it's substantially all of the usage. Your shower is rounding error on usage.
That's not really a solution (Score:5, Interesting)
And they won't get to Bill Gates or Elon Musk. Those guys got private armies. But the $12/hr security guard of your gated community is probably not gonna take a bullet for you.
Re: (Score:2)
A lot of the food grown in California is not only for export, but it makes very little profit for the state so there's no motivation to protect it. It is however very hard to wiggle out of delivering on water rights, even when they are destroying the state.
Re: (Score:2)
You need to start thinking beyond y
Re: (Score:3)
You do understand that that food is being eaten
You do understand that food is being wasted.
Stop acting like every pound of food not produced in California is taken out of someone's mouth, that's nonsense. You've made multiple posts based on this idea and it's bollocks. It's also frankly beside the point. If we don't have enough water to keep producing the rice exported to other countries, then the rice production is going to stop sooner or later. The only question is, are we going to keep producing it until it also dooms California?
Re: (Score:2)
And then we could collect that money from the water utilities and send everyone a quarterly check to help cover the cost of food, kind of like a carbon fee-and-dividend [wikipedia.org]. As is usual with this type of scheme, poor people who buy the cheapest, most water-efficient food would come out ahead, so it would almost be like a universal basic income [wikipedia.org].
Let's do it!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
They can't. A large portion of the water rights/allocations is a "use it or lose it" case. The physical existence of said water doesn't seem to be accounted for anywhere in legislation.
Meaning farmers simply will rather irrigate the desert to keep access to the same amount of water in the future.
Re: (Score:2)
Unless I want to see the prices of water-intensive things grown in the southwest increase to be a true market value, you mean. Maybe almonds shouldn't be grown in California.
Re: (Score:2)
Swamp coolers don't use a lot of water (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
John Oliver had this - water crisis in the south west [youtu.be]- as the focus of his show last week. No computer centers mentioned directly, though.
Re: It's crazy that nobody but Gavin Newsom (Score:2)
I'd love to have an excuse to not water my lawn. Or even have one for that matter. Xeriscaping would be far more appropriate for the Southwest. Why don't you have a word with my HOA on this subject? I love the sound of their laughter when anyone tries to challenge their absolute sovereignty over residential land use.
Re: (Score:2)
> People are going to start leaving when they can't water their lawns or even take showers daily.
People in AZ learned to live with less water. Lawns are already considered passe in S. California. Most new houses use AZ-style landscaping: rocks, succulents, cacti, desert shrub, etc. I'd do it to my own yard if not for the trees, as raking leaves off rocks is a PITA.
And there are ways to shower more parsimoniously. For example, an easy on-off toggle lever so one can shut it down while doing something that
Re: (Score:2)
Damn, you've hit on the solution: make more water. Have you told anyone else about this or shall we keep it a secret?
Re: (Score:2)
The American Southwest has been on a collision course to this drought for decades. There is an excellent book about this called "Cadillac Desert" by Marc Reisner. First published in 1986, was a PBS special in 1996 it traces the history of water policy in the Southwest. The root cause of the problem is that all water allocation in the Southwest is based on a single number, the flow volume of the Colorado river at Lee's Ferry, AZ. The problem is the Bureau of Reclamation assumed that this number was the ave
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
In the early 90s I worked in a local municipal water utilities department. California's water problems were widely known even back then. Decades later the problem has only gotten worse.
As others have already stated, humans are terrible at long term planning. Therefore, they wait for a problem to become a crisis and then address it while pointing fingers and patting themselves on the back.
Re: (Score:2)
>People are going to start leaving when they can't water their lawns or even take showers daily. And that means they'll pile into the rest of the country, driving up cost of living there.
That depends on who they can get to take their houses and how much they can get for them under such circumstances. Who wants to move *into* that? And if it actually becomes a trend you can expect housing prices to fall in those areas.
Re: (Score:2)
The west had to be occupied quickly, so heavy subsidies and welfare were put place even though the land was largely uninhabitable. With California it was a beacon for white flight.
New realities have to be observed with normalization of costs based on current expenditures to provide the resources.
Re: (Score:2)
Time to watch Chinatown [imdb.com] again.
Re: (Score:2)
Edge Computing (Score:2)
With a growing move towards Edge computing, some of this cloud technology pace may slow down.
Also natural air cooling is sufficient for many modern servers now - water cooling may not always be needed.
Lastly some of this water could be recycled and provide heating for homes in district heating projects.
District heating is popular in a number of locations already - ones that spring to mind are Berlin, some parts of Austria and in Ireland (Amazon, Tallaght in Dublin)
Re: (Score:2)
Does natural air cooling work when the outside air temperature is 110F?
District heating is usually not needed when it's over 100 F outside.
In the winter is a different matter.
Waterless Coolant (Score:2)
I'm curious as to why they haven't switched over to waterless coolant. It's lifetime, dissipates heat much more efficiently, and there's no scale or corrosion issues. Yes, it's more expensive than just water but a closed loop system should be efficient enough to keep the data centers humming.
How could it be untracked? (Score:2)
They've got water meters, don't they? Everybody in the West, businesses and residences alike, pays a water bill. Surely they've got some kind of allotment. Or do they pull their water directly from a river without permission?
Four Corners plus California (Score:2)
Doesn't that make a Six Corners?
Or a Four Corners with an obscene boner.
"Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting" (Score:2)
nuclear - with helium turbines (Score:2)
If nuclear reactors were used with closed-cycle turbines (utilizing helium, for example) were used, this wouldn't be a problem. Even without using a closed-cycle turbine, nuclear is still much better at water usage than hydroelectric.
Re: (Score:2)
Think evaporative cooler
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
you'd think chip companies were smarter and put them around the Great Lakes. The SW is in 22 yr drought and no let up is expected. For the current situation, see the drought map:
https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu... [unl.edu]