I found a lot of value in this article. Out of frustration with people who are alarmist over how much water a datacenter "consumes" compared to households, I've probably erred too often towards:
'People sometimes invoke the idea that water moves through a cycle and never really gets destroyed, in order to suggest that we don’t need to be concerned at all about water use. But while water may not get destroyed, it can get “used up” in the sense that it becomes infeasible or uneconomic to access it.'
Side note, this personal anecdote from the author caught me off guard: "my monthly water bill is roughly 5% of the cost of my monthly electricity bill". I'm in the American southwest (but not arid desert like parts of Arizona/Nevada/Utah), and my monthly water cost averages out annually to ~60% of the cost of electricity. Makes me wonder if my water prices are high, if my electricity prices are low, if my water usage is high or my electricity usage is low.
Biggest alarmist is movement against Nestle using water for bottled water in California. They don’t even use as much as an average golf course.
How much water is wasted on golf courses in these arid regions? Or growing water intensive crops like alfalfa that isn’t even directly used to feed people.
Yep, 1.6 trillion gallons of water from the Colorado river goes into irrigation for alfalfa[1]. Google's total water consumption across all data centers in 2023 was 6.4 billion gallons[2].
People are sounding the alarm about water usage in AI data centers while ignoring the real unsustainable industries like animal agriculture.
Talking about wasteful. There 16,000 golf courses that use 312,000 gallons a day[1]. Thats 1.82 trillion gallons annually. Only 28 million people play golf course on a course. Google's MAU is 90%+ of US population, beef or milk consumptions i would guess that 90% of population consumes it at least once a month. We're focusing on things that everyone uses but the things that less than 10% of the populations partake in. Why do we have golf courses in arid regions that have severe water shortages? Before places like LA county spends $8 billion on a toilet to tap system[2], maybe shut down the golf courses first.
It’s a great example of using large numbers without context to scare people.
Say “6.4 billion gallons” in isolation and people will be horrified. Put it in context relative to something like alfalfa farming and it doesn’t even appear on the same scale.
I've remembered the fact that a million seconds is ~11 days and a billion seconds is ~32 years since I was a kid. Still feels pretty ridiculous as an adult, no-one who didn't know it has even guessed close (and some who try to work it out were way off).
I just had to google what a trillion is in years, and the answer made me realise I don't instinctively understand the relationship between a billion and a trillion either!
Each "-illion" is 1000x bigger than the previous one.
If you have some cubes 1 cm on a side (about the size of a sugar cube), you can make a bigger cube out of them with 10 little cubes along each edge. Now you have 1 big cube made from 1000 smaller cubes.
Your bigger cube is now 10cm x 10cm x 10 cm. Easy enough to pick up in one hand.
Now do it again. Make a bigger cube with 10 of those cubes along each edge. Now you have a cube 1 meter on each side. Too big to pick up by hand but it would still fit in the back of a pickup truck.
This 1-meter cube contains 1 million sugar cubes.
Do it again: With 1000 of the previous cubes, make a cube 10 meters on a side. This cube is the size of a 3-story house, and it contains 1 billion sugar cubes.
Now do it once more: With the house-sized cubes, make a 10x10x10. Now the cube is about the size of a football stadium. It contains 1 trillion sugar cubes.
Take 4 of these stadiums, call each sugar cube $1, and you have the market cap of Nvidia.
[Note: This is US usage. In older UK English, some of the "-illion" words mean different things than they do here.]
You pay for fuel for your car => Saudi monarchy gets it share because they supply it => while they completely waste 20% for “supercars” and vanity, they still have enough money to do whatever they want including => they grow alfalfa next to you to feed their local cattle
You are overlooking location. The ideal place to grow crops is a place with great soil, good weather, a long growing season, and abundant water, but there aren't a lot of those. Of those four things, water is the only one that can be reasonably transported.
Data centers have fewer constraints. It should be possible to place more or all of them in places where water is abundant.
My comment was just focused on total water use. I agree that location does matter, and that data centers should be placed where water is abundant.
It still doesn't change my concern about how unsustainable growing alfalfa is. Trillions of gallons to grow an inefficient animal feed crop while we're told by the evening news to take shorter showers (8 minute shower is ~16 gallons of water) and let our lawns die.
You are overlooking location. The ideal place to place a datacenter is a place with cheap land, cheap electricity, good backbone connectivity, and close to users, but there aren't a lot of those.
Water is not evenly distributed.aData centers are not bieng located where there is excess water, they are bieng located in areas where they have access to the critical infrastucture they need,and the use of domestic potable water supplys to cool there operations is done as it reduces there land
and infrastructure requirements, is quick, and they care nothing about the costs of electricity and water, while they drive up costs for the people who live in the surounding areas.
People NEED water, data does not.
People NEED agriculture, they do not NEED data.
conflating the water uses of things to people is false.
Vastly cheaper to just have an efficient water market. But the current system makes farmer either use their water allocations for agriculture or not have that water at all.
I remember doing the calculations on the Nestle plant that caused a big storm a few years ago. The plant sat on several acres of land, which if converted into an alfalfa farm, would have consumed the same amount of water. The surrounding area was littered with alfalfa farms so it wasn't an unfair comparison. Meanwhile that bottling plant employs dozens of people, far more then a farm would have.
You can waste the energy you spent cleaning it and pumping it around. But between nuclear and solar we ought to have an overabundance of that.
In a market economy, if it becomes "economically infeasible" to purify used water, the price goes up slightly, and suddenly it makes a lot more sense to treat dirty water, or even seawater.
You see the same type of argument against oil or mineral use; the idea that we'll run out. But people who argue we'll run out almost always look at confirmed reserves that are economical to extract right now. When prices rise, this sends a signal to prospectors and miners to go look for more, and it also makes far more reserves economical.
For example, Alberta's oil sands were never counted as oil reserves in bygone decades, because mining it made no sense at the time. But the economy grew per capita and overall, prices rose, and suddenly Canada is an oil-rich nation.
A similar dynamic applies to water and everything else.
Of course there are finite amounts of oil and uranium and so on, but the amounts just on this one planet are absolutely mind-boggling. The Earth has a radius of 6400km, and our deepest mines are 3-4km. We may expect richer mineral deposits (not oil) as we go further down.
Keep following this price logic and at a certain point it'll make sense to mine the far side of the moon, the asteroid belt, and so on ad infinitum.
You are not technically wrong, but you are economically wrong.
The water cycle _could_ require spending grid energy to filter/pump water into an economically usable state. Instead if water was better managed, we would not need to build additional grid capacity for water management.
Your argument basically boils down to "If energy was unlimited, we could be wasteful!", which, again, is technically true, but ignores the economic reality.
From what I can glean from Google, the sun moves 1500 cubic kilometers of water from the ocean into the air every day, around 500,000 cubic kilometers a year (ie, a stupendous amount).
Apparently around 10% of that makes it up the various mountains and comes back down as rivers - that's 50,000 cubic kilometers.
And for scale, human "consumption" is 5000 cubic kilometers.
I agree we should be careful and intelligent about how we use water and where we get it from, but I fail to be alarmed.
Every degree of global warming raises the amount of water the air can hold by 7%. That's what's going on in California recently. We only need to put our finger on the scale to really fuck things up. We don't have to stand on it.
Also heat island effect. We don't have to move the needle in Yosemite to make downtown LA into a death trap.
What's your tidy "Me worry?" explanation for aquifer depletion?
Water used for nuclear reactor cooling can only be returned to the environment if its temperature is within 0.5 deg F of the local source temperature. I live near a facility that is on the river with several man made cooling lakes. During the winter, there is constant fog and ice by the roads. So much so, that the road to the facility itself has covered bridge crossing one of the lakes.
During drought, the capacity of the plant is reduced due to lack of cooling capacity.
And remember, the reactor is used to generate high pressure steam which produces electricity, hot water and low grade steam. Even with high efficiency gas turbines and heat integration, there is a significant amount of steam that needs to be condensed before it can be feed back into the reactor.
If it's the same molecule but downhill and mixed in with some other ones, it's just x number of joules and y number of dollars' worth of infrastructure away from being among its own kind and uphill from your tap again.
We get blasted with an uncountable number of these joules from above (the sun) and below (nuclear). Our economy is generating an exponentially increasing number of dollars.
I understand wanting to be careful with resources, but not to the point where frugality becomes a goal in and of itself.
That's like saying fossil fuels don't actually pollute or emit greenhouse cases, because we're just X joules away from sequestering it back from the atmosphere.
Desalination, and pumping water over thousands of miles is extremely expensive. Sure, you're not wrong, but the values of X and Y are uneconomical.
I don't think they're uneconomical. Fresh, clean water is astonishingly cheap; of course people are using it to grow almonds and alfalfa in the desert.
Just charge people what the water is worth and they'll stop, or water companies will be able to afford much more treatment capacity.
You have a point about sequestering CO2 molecules, but:
a) I'm sure this will get cheaper over time, just like every other technology
b) we should be using solar and nuclear for everything
People grow almonds in the desert specifically because they have access to artificially cheap water. In the U.S. lots of land comes with water rights: e.g. if a river or creek passes through your land you can use x% of the water to irregate your crops. Some of these water rights date back to the 1800s and they're locked in.
The water rights can be clawed back a couple ways: if they're unused for X years, or in times of drought.
There's an exception for droughts though: farmers with trees (that would die if unwatered) still get priority, while people that grow crops that replenish each season (like wheat) don't.
So this leads to perverse incentives where these farmers need to find a way to use ALL of their water, every year, or they'll lose access to their absurd water rights from the 1800s, and they need to use it on trees so it doesn't get clawed back during a multi year drought.
So, they end up planting the most water-hungry trees they can grow on their land (almonds), then they get to sell them to the world at artificially low prices because the water that was used to grow them is almost free.
Because you can find it in "concentrated" form (think entropy), all in an aquifer or a river, and these are everywhere. But these dry up because of our usage and the climate, and when they do you still have the same amount of water on the planet, it's just not as easily accessible. It's super spread out, it's too far away, it needs a lot of expensive processing to make usable, or all of the above.
What's cheaper and easier for you, to condense a cup of water from the air or to just turn on the faucet?
> we should be using solar and nuclear for everything
Why solar? Energy is not lost/consumed in the universe, so why not collect it from anywhere else. Energy is astonishingly cheap, that's why we use so much of it. If you know what I mean...
While I do agree the hysteria around water use is unfounded, it's just patently false to say that fresh water cannot be wasted, pointing out that the molecule is just in a harder to access state is pedantry.
But the reason I hammer on about this point is precisely due to the hysteria. In the popular imagination, we spray x million gallons of water onto a golf course, and it just evaporates, never to be seen again. It is the alarmism that alarms me.
True. However, substitution of one good for another, or bringing online another source, won’t be instantaneous and thus otherwise needless human suffering will occur. The raw numbers don’t capture that.
Here in Michigan, my water price is also about 5% of my electric bill. Which is also small, we barely used the AC this summer.
Water billing here is (frustratingly) not progressive: the first thousand gallons costs the same as the tenth or hundredth thousand gallons. It's cheap, we're surrounded by fresh water on the surface and you can stick a well down through 80-100 feet of glacial sand and gravel and get drinkable water basically anywhere.
I was surprised to learn that 70% of my township's municipal water is used by only 15% of the households: basically, those that irrigate their lawns daily.
>I'm in the American southwest (but not arid desert like parts of Arizona/Nevada/Utah)
Doesn’t matter whether you are in the desert or not, only matters if you are in a shared watershed with them. There is huge agricultural demand for water and water rights in those areas which translates to high prices for the areas where they can source water (like your presumably more-watered location)
I think the water-usage stuff regarding data centers is really lacking context in online discourse – and yet, I still believe that freshwater usage really needs to be more of a concern for people, generally. I'm not 'anti-AI' but, I cringe a bit every time someone dismissively says "water cycle" to dismiss concerns around freshwater because, some aquifers are not going to recharge in a meaningful timeframe. That water isn't 'destroyed' – but if a town is tight on water already, it's not necessarily coming back, practically speaking.
I would like to know how much water is taken by a datacenter vs. the same size space of apartments. I can see why it could be considered a bad choice for communities long term if a datacenter takes more.
I’ve driven through The Dalles. It’s a very small town. A search shows a population of 15,000 and declining annually.
It’s also right on a big river. The article you linked said that Google was spending nearly $30 million to improve the city’s water infrastructure so there are no problems.
Talking about this in terms of percentages of a small town’s water supply while ignoring the fact that the city is literally on a giant river and Google is paying for the water infrastructure is misleading.
That's because it's a large industry and nobody lives there. This pattern appears all over the place. The paper mills in the pacific northwest consume large multiples of the water used by their little towns.
That's not the point, the question was whether an apartment building would use the same amount of water and clearly an apartment would consume substantially less water.
No, the question was whether "the same size space of apartments" (i.e. apartment buildings occupying the same land area as the datacenter) would use more or less water than the datacenter.
Under reasonable assumptions, the apartments would use more water.
- Google's datacenter complex in the Dalles covers ~190 acres.
- Typical density for apartment buildings is 50 units/acre, meaning you'd have 9,500 units on 190 acres.
- Average household size in the US is 2.5, so the 9,500 units would have a population of 23,750.
- According to the original article, per capita domestic water usage in the U.S. is 82 gallons per day, meaning a total water consumption of 710M gal/yr for the apartments. And this doesn't count the substantial indirect water usage you'd need to support this population.
- The Google datacenter uses 355M gal/yr (per the Oregonian article).
- 710M > 355M
Now, it would be somewhat ridiculous to replace the entire Google datacenter with apartment buildings in a rural town with declining population, but that was the original question...
If you replace the area of that data center with apartments, as the question suggested, it would add half again to the local population, which could indeed use 30% of the city water.
I'm not understanding the logic. You want to add more population to the city? That doesn't seem fair but I'll concede I may not understand the point you're trying to make.
Assuming that the population is the same in the city and you just move residents into an apartment complex. I don't understand how you would get the same water consumption, am I missing something? Evaporative cooling is extremely water heavy and these facilities also have the normal HVAC you'd expect. Everything just seems to point to more water usage not less.
Some quick napkin math using averages (data center designs vary). One of Google's larger and thirstier data centers, in Oklahoma, is said to use 833 million gallons per year (that's about 2500 acre-feet, in useful terms). It occupies about 250 acres, most of which looks to be parking lots but whatever. The number of households that can be supported on 1 acre-foot per year ranges from 2 to 6 depending (Las Vegas on one end, San Francisco on the other).
You said apartments specifically and this urban form usually starts at 50 dwellings per acre, minimum, which would lead me to say the apartments use more water. The break-even point in this equation is 2-5 households per acre.
With no AC and gas hot water, my monthly water bill is ~150% of my electric (that water cost is not including the wastewater that is billed on the water metering).
My water usage is pretty average and my electric usage is apparently hilariously low.
I track my water usage and electricity usage every month. I'm confused why the cost ratio is off by an order of magnitude from the author. The base monthly charge of my water bill ignoring any usage is more then 10% of my largest electricity bill (so maybe that's the answer right there).
> We can also think about it in economic terms. The 2.5 billion gallons per day required to grow cotton in the US created about six billion pounds of cotton in 2023, worth around $4.5 billion. Data centers, by contrast, are critical infrastructure for technology companies worth many trillions of dollars. Anthropic alone, just one of many AI companies, is already making $5 billion dollars every year selling access to its AI model. A gallon of water used to cool a data center is creating thousands of times more value than if that gallon were used to water a cotton plant.
Clothing is a basic human need, whereas data centres or AI are, well, not.
To reduce this to purely "economical value" is bizarre. This is "only madmen and economists believe in infinite growth" type stuff.
As for the rest, one of the concerns is that it adds demand to an already stressed system that struggle to meet the other needs – many of which are far more critical – especially during droughts. The proverbial straw that overflowed the bucket, so to speak. Stuff like "it's 6% of the water used by US golf courses" is far too broad because in some areas there are no water shortage problems and in others there are.
A huge part of the American economy (to take an example) is information services. Yes, we're also incredibly productive farmers, etc. But, a huuugge part of our wealth as a nation is making 'stuff' that isn't really 'stuff'.
We shouldn’t take these numbers blindly, but even if you think the value that Anthropic is providing is inflated by 10x due to it being a fad, that’s still 100x more value than cotton.
Market prices can be wrong, but I think it goes too far to completely disregard them and cut back on AI rather than cotton in places where there’s relatively little water. You can buy cotton from somewhere that has more water, rather than growing it in a desert.
> A gallon of water used to cool a data center is creating thousands of times more value than if that gallon were used to water a cotton plant.
This completely neglects that the cotton is sold for a profit and Anthropic is doing the equivalent of selling $6B for $5B. Looking at it that way, the water used to grow cotton is producing a lot more value.
This would require a much larger area, because servers could not be mounted so densely. Air cooling can't achieve the same amount of heat transferred per unit volume as water cooling. Water has uniquely high specific heat.
Data center water consumption isn't due to it's use as a heat transfer medium, it's due to the evaporative cooling which cashes in water's enthalpy of vaporization.
Thr alternative would be to use a heat pump and spend electricity to cool the water that cools the servers.
Ah, I see. I keep thinking that modern datacenters would looks more like [1], or at least like [2], with direct water cooling. Supermicro servers and even Dell PowerEdge servers now have the direct water cooling option.
OTOH the cooling of the resulting hot water can be evaporative indeed :(
What a great article. Definitely bookmarking this for reference. People who oppose housing construction often invoke "but what about the water??" as their argument, while the fact is that California cities use less water per capita and overall than they did 50 years ago, almost entirely because of better toilets. The last couple of charts really highlight that trend.
Something else worth considering is that many uses at least in California are non-rivalrous. Reducing one water use does not necessarily create free supply of water for some other use, since water is a physical good that must be transported, refined, stored, and delivered. The best example of this is flood irrigation for rice in northern California. Bad optics, perhaps, but the fact is the rice is grown there because it was flooded in the first place. You can stop growing rice, and that will change one of the cells in your spreadsheet, but only because the spreadsheet model isn't quite right. You can also stop feeding cattle entirely and that isn't going to help cities with chronic supply problems, like Santa Barbara, nor will it benefit large urban systems like San Francisco and EBMUD who rely on dedicated alpine supplies.
> People who oppose housing construction often invoke "but what about the water??" as their argument, while the fact is that California cities use less water per capita and overall than they did 50 years ago, almost entirely because of better toilets.
Those people aren't talking about water use, but all the infrastructure around water. If you take a plot of land that used to be occupied by a couple of single family homes and want to build a multi-story apartment building on it, you need bigger, stronger water supply infrastructure to support all those new sinks. You need bigger, stronger sewage infrastructure to support all the new drains and toilets. Not to mention better electrical infra, different garbage disposal infra, and so on. While I'm generally supportive of "moar housing" you can't just plop the housing down and say job done. You need more of everything else peripheral to and supporting that housing.
Dense infra is easier and cheaper to build and maintain than inherently sprawling single family infra where you lay down a lot of material and fixed costs just to service each single home and the infra between them.
And "build moar housing" trivially entails "and the infra to go with it". You're making the opposite mistake by assuming that the solution we already have is somehow better and more affordable only by the virtue that we currently have it which would only make sense if there was no maintenance needed.
You, like them, are wrong, for reasons that I already explained. These urban systems were designed to deliver and were in fact delivering more water 50 years ago than they do currently. Much more. They are underutilized! Building the apartments only takes them marginally up in the direction of their design capacity.
In the case of LA they are underutilized compared to the past because of laws mainly. Hollywood reservoir was lowered in capacity due to the perceived risk of the dam design. Silverlake reservoir was disconnected from the drinking water system due to bromate buildup. LA aqueduct pulls less water than it did in the 1970s in effort to protect Mono lake and mitigate dust in the Owens valley.
Recent advances have been in using spill basins and other infrastructure to recharge groundwater after seasonal storms. During the last storm season, LA county captured 117 billion gallons of stormwater which they claim is enough for the yearly need of almost 3 million homes. Many projects are ongoing to improve this rate of catchment as the state is pushing for LA to meet most of its water needs locally over the next century.
> Average per-capita domestic water use in the US is 82 gallons per day. By comparison, German homes use around 33 gallons per person per day, UK homes use around 37 gallons, and French homes use around 39 gallons.
I want to know way more information about these figures... like, are there significant outliers? Drastically different usage profiles?
What they are calling “per capita domestic water use” is the per capita public+self supplied, which is not the same as home use. They sort of hand-wave over “most of this is used at home” but really it is inclusive of not only lawns (which are bigger in the US) but commercial use of water as well- commercial landscaping (far more in the US than in Europe) and other business use
Plumbing fixtures are also more regulated in the EU but I suspect this is a small portion relative to landscaping.
As with most things, I think there's multiple things. US home also tend to be larger, meaning the hot water line is longer from the tank to the shower. Most americans I know tend to leve the shower running before they get in so it "warms up". I've never been in a European shower that's required that.
Not just the bigger homes, from what I can tell in US home construction the length of the hot water pipe isn't a consideration at all, while it is a common consideration in European homes. In Europe (vast overgeneralization incoming) it's not unusual to have a boiler or a tankless water heater directly in the bathroom to keep the line short, and then have the kitchen close by. Having multiple water heaters per home is also completely normal and a common solution if the kitchen is too far from the bathroom or multiple bathrooms are far from each other. In the US the norm seems to be to just stick a big boiler in the basement or somewhere else out of the way, then run hot water lines everywhere. Maybe in part due to the added effort of running 220V lines in a 110V country
When I worked at a water treatment plant, we produced about 160 million gallons/day of water in the summer time, and only about 80 million gallons/day in the winter time. Now ask yourself what water-consuming activities happen in summer that don't happen in winter.
Primarily, lawns. It's lawns. Most of the international difference in water consumption I would chalk up to lawns, given that the US has much larger average lot sizes and a much larger proportion of detached single-family houses (i.e., houses sitting in the middle of a lawn) than European countries have.
I have a modest front and back yard in the "hot" part of the Bay Area. Summer months I'm pouring 5000 gallons a week to keep it moderately brown. It's insane.
Not really just lawns, but irrigation specifically. I know a lot of people in my country that have detached houses with lawns. I know of no one that owns a sprinkler system. Dry years the lawn just goes a bit brown and no-one cares.
Everyone has a hose, they wash their car and water their flowers by hand.
One thing that shocks me as an immigrant from Europe to the US is toilets. I have not seen a single one that has the two buttons, one for pee and one for the other stuff.
Every time I use the toilet it uses 1.6 gallons. 6 liters...
I think in my home country more than 90% of home toilets are the "low water usage one" (with 3 and 6 liters buttons)
And that's only the start, I noticed that people just don't care about water usage over here. People take water from wells with little oversight. In my home country you need a vast amount of bureaucracy to be allowed to take water from aquifers
The toilet flushing thing is performative. Even if toilet water usage were enough to be worth caring about, dual flush toilets use more water over the lifetime of the toilet, because the more complex designs have a higher failure rate: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/29/dual-flu...
Also, in about half of the country, aquifers replenish as fast as they are used, so there's no point in regulating their use. The largest concern is usually whether or not the well is contaminated.
Say every single one of the 330 million people in America flushes a toilet five times a day, every day of the year.
That’s still less than a cubic mile of water. Lake Mead, by comparison, has a volume of 7 cubic miles. Every American could go back to using outhouses and the water savings wouldn’t even be noticeable.
People are not very good at visualizing this stuff. The volumes involved are hard to grasp.
Or think of it this way: if you personally saved all that water by using an outhouse, it would amount to less than 300 gallons a month. My water bill doesn’t even show usage at a resolution high enough to see those savings. I’m billed per 1,000 gallons.
If the water company doesn’t care enough to track it and charge me for it, it’s noise.
EU put forwards some Eco labeling thing in 2013 to encourage toilet manufacturers to get eco certified and people buy the stuff (though it was already common long before 2013)
Regulation can be for the greater good, and in this case it's not even mandatory.
I feel like there's a cultural difference where wastefulness is frowned upon at home but encouraged in the US. Big cars, big trucks(cars), big trucks(lorries), big (green)lawns, big roads, big houses, big servings, drive everywhere, fly everywhere, no trains, no public transport.
Everything is big except infrastructure unrelated to cars. Except for some cool dams built before something shifted.
And as others mentioned, the "water rights" which can be traded(bought up) by some evil megacorp instead of benefiting local farmers and population becaue ownership trumps everything.
The two button toilets are around, but I agree that they aren't the standard.
Also, wells are regulated in the US, with the exception of low-producing home wells. Even then, they require permitting (the degree of difficulty depends largely upon the state in question). Larger-producing wells have all kinds of reporting and usage requirements associated with them, and water rights can be the most valuable part of a plot of land.
Water and the control of it is the story of the modern American West. Even today, there are a couple of folks up in a coastal community in my county who are fighting to be able to build single family homes on property they bought decades ago. The issue is, you guessed it, water.
Maybe there are regs on appliances in Europe, or maybe the prices are high enough that the market demands efficient appliances (like gas/petrol). Whenever I stay in an airbnb in europe, whether it is a fancy place or a cheap apartment, all the appliances look similarly small and water efficient. The washing machine, flushing, hot water heaters, etc. can all add up. To wit, there is no uniform water efficiency requirements in the US.
It’s probably the lawns and yards, primarily. Including things like pools: in Arizona there’s about one pool for every 13 people. The US averages much larger lot sizes, and those yards consume water.
I’m not saying the US isn’t profligate in other areas like appliances or taking longer showers, but in most the country there’s so much land, such cheap water and very little regulation preventing you from using however much water that you want. Some of the land even comes with a guaranteed quantity of water for irrigation guaranteed, at little to no cost.
I recently looked up whether it would be worth it to me to install a water meter instead of paying a flat-rate. Apparently the flat rate is calculated on a consumption of avout half a cubic meter per day. But, without a water meter, I can only guess if my consumption is more or less than that. My guess is that it's considerably less though.
I live in California, where half of the state is a desert half is a rainforest. The politicians here like to think that everyone lives in urban desert cities built on fault lines next to pyrophytic forests, so our regulations assume that every household needs earthquake proofing, fire proofing, thick insulation, and major urban planning.
I live in an area where pretty much non of those things matter, but one of the regulations that stands out the most is that the water everywhere has to be metered, even though the reserviour near me regularly has to be drained, because it's to full to make it through the wet season.
My water districts solution was to set the price per unit of water at cost, so I pay $40/mo for insfrastructure, and a dollar or two for water. If I quadrupled my water consumption, I wouldn't even notice the price change. I actually pay more to service the meters than I pay for water.
I was curious about the "US Thermal Power Plant Water Use By County" graph which has a very dark square in the SE corner of NC. It's Brunswick County. I guess it's due to the Brunswick Nuclear Generating Station:
I'm somewhat astonished at the per-capita household use of water per day. I assume it must mostly be for watering lawns?
We have a swimming pool that leaks (we were quoted $125k to fix it since the deck will need replacing, and with interest rates being what they are, borrowing to fix it would be rather painful), and we use only 51gal/person/day at our home. I estimate that if fixing the pool would save another 10.
If you do 1 load of laundry per person per day (which is absurd), then the clothes washer cant' be even 1/4 of the over 80 gallons per person per day TFA claims.
Lawns use such an incredible amount of water, particularly people maintaining them in deserts, like in Arizona and parts of California. It boggles my mind that people go out of their way to put so much effort and resources just into having grass in front of their house that they mostly don't use.
Honestly, if you're maintaining a lawn in places that don't get year-round rain, you need to water it. I grew up in Seattle and it never occurred to me that there were places where you didn't need to water a lawn.
> Honestly, if you're maintaining a lawn in places that don't get year-round rain, you need to water it.
Only if you want to grow non-native species and always have it looking like a magazine cover.
My house is sitting in a five acre clearing covered in whatever flora decides to grow there, with minimal "curation" (tend to avoid cutting beautiful native flowers to encourage them to spread, do try and deal with removing things like poison ivy).
When it rains, everything greens up, grows quickly, needs lots of mowing. If it doesn't rain for a few weeks while the sun cooks it, some things will go a bit brown and lifeless. Then the next rain comes and it all perks right back up. When winter comes, it all sits under the snow for months and months and when the snow melts it picks right back up where it left off.
Most of these plants were here before we were and they'll be here after. They don't need my help.
> If it doesn't rain for a few weeks while the sun cooks it, some things will go a bit brown and lifeless. Then the next rain comes and it all perks right back up.
You're right that "only if you want to grow non-native species" because of course a "lawn" in an area where it will die in the summer is by definition non-native.
But you're missing the point about climate, because not raining "for a few weeks" is not the same as living in a place as "wet" as the northwest where it still doesn't rain a drop for 3-4 months in the summer.
I guess my general question in those scenarios is why spend time and water maintaining a lawn of plants that can't grow normally in the local climate? There are definitely plants which survive in the area year round in many places in the US.
It's an expectation. Sometimes just peer-pressure, sometimes with legal backing (there are many HOAs that require lawns, sometimes with a specific list of allowed grasses).
I haven't investigated it because I don't have kids, but I think whatever comprises a typical domestic lawn is a better play/recreation surface than any kind of plants that are native out west.
I think the alternative is artificial surfaces which of course have benefits and drawbacks.
I'm hoping to replace my lawn with low/no-water alternatives soon, but, hey, landscaping is expensive.
yeah, our small suburban house in silicon valley can easily use 400 gallons per day on days where we water the small front and back lawns and drip irrigation, but on a non-watering day, we can use as little as 50 gallons for 2 people.
While this is "a lot" of water, when we've had an irrigation leak in a zone that runs for 5 or 10 minutes, the number can balloon to 900 gallons in a day.
The amount of water used by people who actually don't closely monitor and track their usage, with big properties, lots of plants and lawn to irrigate, must be truly mind-boggling. I wouldn't be surprised if tens of thousands of gallons per day was pretty common at a lot of houses.
> The closest thing the federal government has to a department of water infrastructure, the Bureau of Reclamation, has an annual budget of just $1.1 billion.
One of my favorite books is Cadillac Desert. It's about the damming of the US rivers, the water crisis, and the history of the Bureau.
It may be dwarfed by the other departments, but its had a massive impact on US population development especially in LA.
> From 1902 to 1905, Eaton, Mulholland, and others engaged in underhanded methods to ensure that Los Angeles would gain the water rights in the Owens Valley, blocking the Bureau of Reclamation from building water infrastructure for the residents in Owens Valley.[12]: 48–69 [16]: 62–69 While Eaton engaged in most of the political maneuverings and chicanery,[16]: 62 Mulholland misled Los Angeles public opinion by dramatically understating the amount of water then available for Los Angeles' growth.[16]: 73 Mulholland also misled residents of the Owens Valley; he indicated that Los Angeles would only use unused flows in the Owens Valley, while planning on using the full water rights to fill the aquifer of the San Fernando Valley. [0]
For many years, they piped the entirety of the Owens River to LA, over a hundred miles away and over a mountain range. It is wild that the follies of Los Angeles water management has led to permanent scars in the east side of California from Mono Lake to the Salton Sea disaster.
Potter's analysis of the various consumptive uses of water relies on the USGS survey data of the uses of water, generally a good source. However, there is a small flaw when we try to turn consumptive use into consumption, which is alluded to but not quantified in the USGS report: water losses to evaporation during storage (in reservoirs) and transportation. This is discussed in e.g.:
Much of the literature is preliminary and recommends further study, but the initial estimates indicate that the amount of water that is simply lost from reservoirs is surprisingly large. So I like to yak about covering reservoirs (possibly with solar panels), which won't solve everything, but it has a far larger impact than data centers.
> Water in the US is generally both widely available and inexpensive: my monthly water bill is roughly 5% of the cost of my monthly electricity bill, and the service is far more reliable.
In my experience with municipal utility districts, the reliability of the water supply is typically not much better than the local power grid. The sewage lift stations seem to have the highest quality generator arrangements.
> In my experience with municipal utility districts, the reliability of the water supply is typically not much better than the local power grid.
Both of these services have been phenomenally reliable everywhere I’ve lived in the United States. The only exception was in a town where we’d get ice storms once a year that would bring trees down on top of power lines, but it was shocking how quickly a truck would show up and fix them all.
I can’t actually think of a time my water has stopped working anywhere except once when the road was torn up and pipes had to be replaced. I wasn’t home, we just got letters explaining when it would happen and how to flush the pipes when it was done.
At least from what I've seen in my area, interruptions in water service don't result in a lack of pressure or flow, they result in contamination, and the water districts have to issue boil water orders. It's not a problem you would notice, and if you don't pay attention to local news, you might just end up drinking contaminated water.
In the small town I lived in, we'd pretty frequently get water boiling notifications with our old water tower. Once that was replaced we never got a water boiling notice.
It's interesting you said that. My experience is the opposite. In my last 10 years in California, I've had power outages a couple times a year (mostly due to storm / trees falling on the electrical lines). But I don't recall a time I got water cut off.
Water in the US is generally both widely available and inexpensive: my monthly water bill is roughly 5% of the cost of my monthly electricity bill, and the service is far more reliable.
Is this the norm for most places in the US?
Where I live our water/sewer bill averages out to a little over $100 a month.
Water infrastructure outages are typically due to failures needing repairs (relevant to this discussion: water main breaks which lead to boil water advisories). Few municipalities are fiscally responsible enough to invest in all the preventative maintenance required to completely avoid failures across all types of infrastructure (a low-priority budget item when things are working smoothly), but it also takes decades for water mains to fail.
It said 41% of the water used in the US is for thermo electric cooling. Albeit, it didn't break this down into saltwater vs freshwater. It also said the vast majority of this water usage is due to older plants that did not recirculate the water. The newer plants that recirculate the water only used a tiny fraction of water in comparison.
So...if the US replaces all of its old nuclear power plants, we would free up almost 40% of water used today?
Note that water use is not the same as water consumption. If 100 gallons of water passes through a heat exchanger and 99 gallons go back into the river, only then 100 gallons were used but only 1 gallon was consumed. Thermoelectric cooling makes up a lot of water use, but on 1-2% of water consumption because most of the used water is returned: https://watercalculator.org/footprint/water-use-withdrawal-c...
Furthermore, heat exchangers can use wastewater. This is done at the Palo Verde nuclear plant, for example.
More importantly, though, is that agricultural water is mostly consumption. That water is either evaporated or absorbed by plants.
By contrast, the overwhelming majority of water used by thermoelectric plants is not consumed. Electricity generation amounts to 1-2% of water consumption. There's hardly any water to be saved by changing power generation.
Thermoelectric cooling's 41% includes all thermal plants (coal, gas, nuclear), and most of this water is withdrawn but returned to source, not consumed - so modernizing would reduce withdrawals but not free up that water for other consumptive uses.
How did you go from "thermoelectric" to "nuclear"? The US has nearly as much coal power as nuclear power, and significantly more natural gas than nuclear.
I don't have numbers to quote at you, but I would assume not. Fundamentally coal, nuclear, and gas-boiler (but not gas-turbine) power plants work the same way - you heat up water until it boils, and run the steam through a turbine to turn that heat into mechanical energy. I.e. the "cooling" is also the electricity generation mechanism. As a result same amount of heat should result in the basically same amount of electricity for each process, and since the water is being used in the same way they should be pretty much equal in water (use or consumption)/electricity output efficiency assuming they were built with the same era of technology...
I was mentally referring to this article. It mentioned that natural gas plants only used one tenth that of coal. I assumed this is because natural gas plants are newer etc.
Natural gas-fired generation uses a more energy-efficient technology to produce electricity than coal and has a lower water withdrawal intensity than coal. Natural gas combined-cycle generation had an average water withdrawal intensity of 2,793 gal/MWh in 2020, compared with 21,406 gal/MWh for coal.
Yeah, that's the gas turbine thing. The first-stage (which generates the majority of the power) isn't boiling water, but extracting energy directly from pressure from burning the gas in a jet-engine like fashion.
Coal and natural gas also emit some of their waste heat in the outgoing exhaust gases. Nuclear doesn't have exhaust gases (aside from evaporated cooling water) to carry away waste heat.
The big difference is the much lower thermal efficiency of LWR power plants.
Pretty much every power plant heats water to steam, then uses steam turbines to generate power. This is also how nuclear submarines and arcraft carriers work.
We're leaving it now, the majority of new energy capacity is now solar, and not steam based (>70% in 2024). And a non-trivial chunk of the remainder is wind (also not steam based).
And in the US of the part that's still fossil based, new capacity is combustion turbine based, which at most gets a minority share of its power from a steam bottoming cycle.
Interesting that the infographic (which I thought was exceptionally well-designed, well done USGS) found it necessary to call out that 0 billion gallons/day goes to Mexico. Was this done by previous or this administration I wonder? I do recall reading something about disputes between US and Mexico over abstraction. (Presumably from Rio Grande or similar).
It might be because there used to be a significant flow from the Colorado river into Mexico. But we extract so much that that's gone dry before it reaches the border.
Also, it might be just to show that the other landmass neighboring is not getting anything.
I guess that explains why the water there tastes so nasty. The only places in the US that I ever seek out bottled water are Las Vegas and Phoenix. The water in both places tastes nasty and often comes out of the tap very warm..
> Per Lawrence Berkeley Lab[1], in 2023, data centers used around 48 million gallons of water a day directly for cooling. Most of this water will evaporate as part of the cooling process[2], and is thus consumed.
I'm from the Netherlands. The last few years there have been issues with ground water levels dropping and a lack of rainfall. To the point where water companies are asking consumers to reduce their water use for e.g. irrigating their gardens, shower less long, etc.
Of course, the notion of a water shortage in a country where two of the largest rivers in Europe empty in the North Sea and that keeps about a third of it's land that lies below sea levels dry by actively pumping relatively clean water out is a bit of a weird notion to sell. We have a surplus of water, not a shortage. Rivers overflowing their dikes is an issue we deal with regularly. And a lot of infrastructure to dump that into the North Sea by the millions of liters per day.
The issue isn't that there isn't more clean water than we can handle but that more water gets taken from limited ground water reserves than is added back naturally. This would be a non-issue if we'd mostly use surface water instead.
Most of this ground water isn't even used by consumers but by agriculture. And worse, farmers also work very hard to keep their land dry after irrigating it because they need the ground to be moist, not soaking wet as in a swamp. The water that they drain is very high in nutrients because they are using a lot of fertilizer too. So, basically, agriculture is in the business of taking rain water that dumps on their land and surrounding lands and basically dumping it into rivers without even using it for irrigation. But then when it doesn't rain, they use ground water to irrigate, which then drains into rivers. As a result, nature is suffering because ground water levels are dropping and because surface water is polluted. Ground water is also used for consumers.
The solution is of course to use slightly more expensive to use water from e.g. surface water or rain water (which is generally drained to get rid of it ASAP). Of course a lot of that water isn't as easy to access everywhere so it requires infrastructure (pipes) or storage (reservoirs). But historically, ground water was there and relatively clean (so it can be used without much processing) and people just use it without thinking about it. Most people with gardens don't even capture the water that falls on their roofs, which on an annual basis should be plenty to water their gardens. Neither are they (re)using grey water or rain water for e.g. flushing their toilets. All of that is done using tap water that comes from ground water.
This isn't a shortage crisis but a water abuse crisis. The solution is being a bit smarter about what water we use for which purpose. And a lot of that is rethinking intensive agriculture. We grow crops to feed cattle that produces so much manure that we have severe nitrogen pollution getting in the way of economic growth because we have to limit construction in/near polluted areas. Those crops uses ground water and feed the cattle. The problems are connected.
The reason we have water "issues" in California is due to a complicated system of water rights, where more "senior" and upstream water rights-holders can take as much as they want.
Of course, if we nullified that system, we'd have a new problem; lack of agriculture.
With the rise in climate change and _collective inaction_. We are in a trajectory for mass extinction [1].
With the second AI gold rush coming to a near abrupt stop, political climates worsening, billionaires continuing to loot the collective populace through their pawns in the kakistocracy (USA) and kleptocracy (Russia). We are absolutely cooked.
What’s the point anymore? What are we even solving? Being a _good_ person is no longer worth any value. Just exploit and climb over each other like crabs in barrel.
It's true that we were all sold the lie of individual actions being the way to solve the climate crisis (recycling, turning off lights, etc.) But I think the conclusion is to try other strategies rather than giving up when the first strategy didn't work.
The whole debate is retarded and only real because we try to shut down our power plants so we can’t have large scale desalination. When I was younger I hoped that all these degrowthers would just age out. But it turns out young people keep filling in the ranks.
The interesting thing is watching as they all complain about the consequences of stifling growth without realizing that’s what’s happening.
“I don’t want any more housing here. It’s too expensive”
Totally retarded but fortunately I’ve figured out my way around this stuff.
I found a lot of value in this article. Out of frustration with people who are alarmist over how much water a datacenter "consumes" compared to households, I've probably erred too often towards:
'People sometimes invoke the idea that water moves through a cycle and never really gets destroyed, in order to suggest that we don’t need to be concerned at all about water use. But while water may not get destroyed, it can get “used up” in the sense that it becomes infeasible or uneconomic to access it.'
Side note, this personal anecdote from the author caught me off guard: "my monthly water bill is roughly 5% of the cost of my monthly electricity bill". I'm in the American southwest (but not arid desert like parts of Arizona/Nevada/Utah), and my monthly water cost averages out annually to ~60% of the cost of electricity. Makes me wonder if my water prices are high, if my electricity prices are low, if my water usage is high or my electricity usage is low.
Biggest alarmist is movement against Nestle using water for bottled water in California. They don’t even use as much as an average golf course.
How much water is wasted on golf courses in these arid regions? Or growing water intensive crops like alfalfa that isn’t even directly used to feed people.
Yep, 1.6 trillion gallons of water from the Colorado river goes into irrigation for alfalfa[1]. Google's total water consumption across all data centers in 2023 was 6.4 billion gallons[2].
People are sounding the alarm about water usage in AI data centers while ignoring the real unsustainable industries like animal agriculture.
1: https://coloradosun.com/2024/04/04/research-colorado-river-w...
2: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-emissions-...
Talking about wasteful. There 16,000 golf courses that use 312,000 gallons a day[1]. Thats 1.82 trillion gallons annually. Only 28 million people play golf course on a course. Google's MAU is 90%+ of US population, beef or milk consumptions i would guess that 90% of population consumes it at least once a month. We're focusing on things that everyone uses but the things that less than 10% of the populations partake in. Why do we have golf courses in arid regions that have severe water shortages? Before places like LA county spends $8 billion on a toilet to tap system[2], maybe shut down the golf courses first.
1. https://www.npr.org/2008/06/11/91363837/water-thirsty-golf-c...
2. https://www.mwdh2o.com/building-local-supplies/pure-water-so...
I'm mildly surprised that almost 10% of the US golfs. That makes the 0.3% of water usage from TFA seem less bad.
It’s a great example of using large numbers without context to scare people.
Say “6.4 billion gallons” in isolation and people will be horrified. Put it in context relative to something like alfalfa farming and it doesn’t even appear on the same scale.
Absolutely, not to mention the difficulty people have in grasping the difference between a billion and a trillion.
Always use the same unit in comparisons.
Instead of "1.6 trillion vs 6.4 billion" write "1600 billion vs 6.4 billion"!
I've remembered the fact that a million seconds is ~11 days and a billion seconds is ~32 years since I was a kid. Still feels pretty ridiculous as an adult, no-one who didn't know it has even guessed close (and some who try to work it out were way off).
I just had to google what a trillion is in years, and the answer made me realise I don't instinctively understand the relationship between a billion and a trillion either!
Each "-illion" is 1000x bigger than the previous one.
If you have some cubes 1 cm on a side (about the size of a sugar cube), you can make a bigger cube out of them with 10 little cubes along each edge. Now you have 1 big cube made from 1000 smaller cubes.
Your bigger cube is now 10cm x 10cm x 10 cm. Easy enough to pick up in one hand.
Now do it again. Make a bigger cube with 10 of those cubes along each edge. Now you have a cube 1 meter on each side. Too big to pick up by hand but it would still fit in the back of a pickup truck.
This 1-meter cube contains 1 million sugar cubes.
Do it again: With 1000 of the previous cubes, make a cube 10 meters on a side. This cube is the size of a 3-story house, and it contains 1 billion sugar cubes.
Now do it once more: With the house-sized cubes, make a 10x10x10. Now the cube is about the size of a football stadium. It contains 1 trillion sugar cubes.
Take 4 of these stadiums, call each sugar cube $1, and you have the market cap of Nvidia.
[Note: This is US usage. In older UK English, some of the "-illion" words mean different things than they do here.]
What’s the difference between a million and a billion? A billion.
"You have a million dollars? Damn man you a regular Elon Musk or something"
I understand it takes a gallon of water to grow one almond in California.
That's right, and it takes ~600 gallons of water to make one hamburger.
1: https://watercalculator.org/footprint/what-is-the-water-foot...
2: https://www.almonds.com/why-almonds/growing-good/water-wise
And most of that alfalfa is owned by a Saudi conglomerate that then exports it to the other side of the planet to feed its dairy cattle
You pay for fuel for your car => Saudi monarchy gets it share because they supply it => while they completely waste 20% for “supercars” and vanity, they still have enough money to do whatever they want including => they grow alfalfa next to you to feed their local cattle
You are overlooking location. The ideal place to grow crops is a place with great soil, good weather, a long growing season, and abundant water, but there aren't a lot of those. Of those four things, water is the only one that can be reasonably transported.
Data centers have fewer constraints. It should be possible to place more or all of them in places where water is abundant.
My comment was just focused on total water use. I agree that location does matter, and that data centers should be placed where water is abundant.
It still doesn't change my concern about how unsustainable growing alfalfa is. Trillions of gallons to grow an inefficient animal feed crop while we're told by the evening news to take shorter showers (8 minute shower is ~16 gallons of water) and let our lawns die.
You are overlooking location. The ideal place to place a datacenter is a place with cheap land, cheap electricity, good backbone connectivity, and close to users, but there aren't a lot of those.
Water is not evenly distributed.aData centers are not bieng located where there is excess water, they are bieng located in areas where they have access to the critical infrastucture they need,and the use of domestic potable water supplys to cool there operations is done as it reduces there land and infrastructure requirements, is quick, and they care nothing about the costs of electricity and water, while they drive up costs for the people who live in the surounding areas. People NEED water, data does not. People NEED agriculture, they do not NEED data. conflating the water uses of things to people is false.
Solar powered desalination seems like a no brainer in places like California.
Vastly cheaper to just have an efficient water market. But the current system makes farmer either use their water allocations for agriculture or not have that water at all.
Desalination can be ecologically disastrous. You have to put all that salt somewhere (and it's a lot).
Attach a salt factory to the desalination plant?
I remember doing the calculations on the Nestle plant that caused a big storm a few years ago. The plant sat on several acres of land, which if converted into an alfalfa farm, would have consumed the same amount of water. The surrounding area was littered with alfalfa farms so it wasn't an unfair comparison. Meanwhile that bottling plant employs dozens of people, far more then a farm would have.
There are a lot of historical reasons for people to be angry at Nestle, aside from their impact on water.
It's become a meme, or a badge to display your tribal affiliation, to be mad at Nestle. Monsanto is another example of this phenomenon.
nit: Nestle sold off it's water brands in 2021 to a private equity group.[0][1]
0 - https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2025/05/09/nestle-to-s... 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l2Bas81NDY
Right cause we have all gone and measured truth. Not just read possibly biased information off a screen.
Asimov wrote about this in Foundation. If you are not checking yourself it's blind faith in inherently self selecting dishonest people
Many golf courses in arid regions are on greywater.
That could be used as potable water again. Orange county,CA injects treated waste water back into the aquifer then pumps back out for water.
https://www.ocwd.com/gwrs
Orange county CA also irrigates its golf courses with its greywater.
Why is water used for golf a waste vs other uses?
From an utilitarian point of view golf courses use a lot of water per person playing.
the parent poster's using a sort of morality argument to call water usage they dont/cant benefit from as wastage.
The issue with Nestle is that they are paying pennies on the dollar compared to the public because "muh job creation" or something to that effect.
> How much water is wasted on golf courses...
Zero. You can't waste water, it goes in a cycle.
I mean unless you transport it off-planet.
You can waste the energy you spent cleaning it and pumping it around. But between nuclear and solar we ought to have an overabundance of that.
In a market economy, if it becomes "economically infeasible" to purify used water, the price goes up slightly, and suddenly it makes a lot more sense to treat dirty water, or even seawater.
You see the same type of argument against oil or mineral use; the idea that we'll run out. But people who argue we'll run out almost always look at confirmed reserves that are economical to extract right now. When prices rise, this sends a signal to prospectors and miners to go look for more, and it also makes far more reserves economical.
For example, Alberta's oil sands were never counted as oil reserves in bygone decades, because mining it made no sense at the time. But the economy grew per capita and overall, prices rose, and suddenly Canada is an oil-rich nation.
A similar dynamic applies to water and everything else.
Of course there are finite amounts of oil and uranium and so on, but the amounts just on this one planet are absolutely mind-boggling. The Earth has a radius of 6400km, and our deepest mines are 3-4km. We may expect richer mineral deposits (not oil) as we go further down.
Keep following this price logic and at a certain point it'll make sense to mine the far side of the moon, the asteroid belt, and so on ad infinitum.
> Zero. You can't waste water, it goes in a cycle.
You can waste water because not all water sources are equally renewable. Some underground aquifers recharge slower than we extract from them.
You are not technically wrong, but you are economically wrong.
The water cycle _could_ require spending grid energy to filter/pump water into an economically usable state. Instead if water was better managed, we would not need to build additional grid capacity for water management.
Your argument basically boils down to "If energy was unlimited, we could be wasteful!", which, again, is technically true, but ignores the economic reality.
And we couldn’t anyway because we’d bake the surface of the planet with all the waste heat from that free energy.
Doesn't pass the sniff test:
From what I can glean from Google, the sun moves 1500 cubic kilometers of water from the ocean into the air every day, around 500,000 cubic kilometers a year (ie, a stupendous amount).
Apparently around 10% of that makes it up the various mountains and comes back down as rivers - that's 50,000 cubic kilometers.
And for scale, human "consumption" is 5000 cubic kilometers.
I agree we should be careful and intelligent about how we use water and where we get it from, but I fail to be alarmed.
Every degree of global warming raises the amount of water the air can hold by 7%. That's what's going on in California recently. We only need to put our finger on the scale to really fuck things up. We don't have to stand on it.
Also heat island effect. We don't have to move the needle in Yosemite to make downtown LA into a death trap.
What's your tidy "Me worry?" explanation for aquifer depletion?
Degree C/K or F/R?
Water used for nuclear reactor cooling can only be returned to the environment if its temperature is within 0.5 deg F of the local source temperature. I live near a facility that is on the river with several man made cooling lakes. During the winter, there is constant fog and ice by the roads. So much so, that the road to the facility itself has covered bridge crossing one of the lakes.
During drought, the capacity of the plant is reduced due to lack of cooling capacity.
And remember, the reactor is used to generate high pressure steam which produces electricity, hot water and low grade steam. Even with high efficiency gas turbines and heat integration, there is a significant amount of steam that needs to be condensed before it can be feed back into the reactor.
That’s a fake constraint though. If there was any actual shortage people would use it immediately.
Temperature controls gate returning to env.
Fresh water in a reservoir above a water treatment plant is not the same as salt water in the ocean even if it's the same molecule in the same cycle.
If it's the same molecule but downhill and mixed in with some other ones, it's just x number of joules and y number of dollars' worth of infrastructure away from being among its own kind and uphill from your tap again.
We get blasted with an uncountable number of these joules from above (the sun) and below (nuclear). Our economy is generating an exponentially increasing number of dollars.
I understand wanting to be careful with resources, but not to the point where frugality becomes a goal in and of itself.
That's like saying fossil fuels don't actually pollute or emit greenhouse cases, because we're just X joules away from sequestering it back from the atmosphere.
Desalination, and pumping water over thousands of miles is extremely expensive. Sure, you're not wrong, but the values of X and Y are uneconomical.
I don't think they're uneconomical. Fresh, clean water is astonishingly cheap; of course people are using it to grow almonds and alfalfa in the desert.
Just charge people what the water is worth and they'll stop, or water companies will be able to afford much more treatment capacity.
You have a point about sequestering CO2 molecules, but:
a) I'm sure this will get cheaper over time, just like every other technology
b) we should be using solar and nuclear for everything
People grow almonds in the desert specifically because they have access to artificially cheap water. In the U.S. lots of land comes with water rights: e.g. if a river or creek passes through your land you can use x% of the water to irregate your crops. Some of these water rights date back to the 1800s and they're locked in.
The water rights can be clawed back a couple ways: if they're unused for X years, or in times of drought.
There's an exception for droughts though: farmers with trees (that would die if unwatered) still get priority, while people that grow crops that replenish each season (like wheat) don't.
So this leads to perverse incentives where these farmers need to find a way to use ALL of their water, every year, or they'll lose access to their absurd water rights from the 1800s, and they need to use it on trees so it doesn't get clawed back during a multi year drought.
So, they end up planting the most water-hungry trees they can grow on their land (almonds), then they get to sell them to the world at artificially low prices because the water that was used to grow them is almost free.
> Fresh, clean water is astonishingly cheap
Because you can find it in "concentrated" form (think entropy), all in an aquifer or a river, and these are everywhere. But these dry up because of our usage and the climate, and when they do you still have the same amount of water on the planet, it's just not as easily accessible. It's super spread out, it's too far away, it needs a lot of expensive processing to make usable, or all of the above.
What's cheaper and easier for you, to condense a cup of water from the air or to just turn on the faucet?
> we should be using solar and nuclear for everything
Why solar? Energy is not lost/consumed in the universe, so why not collect it from anywhere else. Energy is astonishingly cheap, that's why we use so much of it. If you know what I mean...
Energy is never lost, however, it’s transduced into less and less useful forms due to entropy.
While I do agree the hysteria around water use is unfounded, it's just patently false to say that fresh water cannot be wasted, pointing out that the molecule is just in a harder to access state is pedantry.
But the reason I hammer on about this point is precisely due to the hysteria. In the popular imagination, we spray x million gallons of water onto a golf course, and it just evaporates, never to be seen again. It is the alarmism that alarms me.
There’s nothing wrong with frugality as an end-goal as long as it’s not coerced.
True. However, substitution of one good for another, or bringing online another source, won’t be instantaneous and thus otherwise needless human suffering will occur. The raw numbers don’t capture that.
Here in Michigan, my water price is also about 5% of my electric bill. Which is also small, we barely used the AC this summer.
Water billing here is (frustratingly) not progressive: the first thousand gallons costs the same as the tenth or hundredth thousand gallons. It's cheap, we're surrounded by fresh water on the surface and you can stick a well down through 80-100 feet of glacial sand and gravel and get drinkable water basically anywhere.
I was surprised to learn that 70% of my township's municipal water is used by only 15% of the households: basically, those that irrigate their lawns daily.
Why should it be progressive if it's not even scarce there? Why are you trying to punish people unnecessarily?
>I'm in the American southwest (but not arid desert like parts of Arizona/Nevada/Utah)
Doesn’t matter whether you are in the desert or not, only matters if you are in a shared watershed with them. There is huge agricultural demand for water and water rights in those areas which translates to high prices for the areas where they can source water (like your presumably more-watered location)
I think the water-usage stuff regarding data centers is really lacking context in online discourse – and yet, I still believe that freshwater usage really needs to be more of a concern for people, generally. I'm not 'anti-AI' but, I cringe a bit every time someone dismissively says "water cycle" to dismiss concerns around freshwater because, some aquifers are not going to recharge in a meaningful timeframe. That water isn't 'destroyed' – but if a town is tight on water already, it's not necessarily coming back, practically speaking.
I would like to know how much water is taken by a datacenter vs. the same size space of apartments. I can see why it could be considered a bad choice for communities long term if a datacenter takes more.
The government in The Dalles, Oregon were suing local newspapers that were questioning Google's water usage in the city:
https://www.rcfp.org/dalles-google-oregonian-settlement/
Apparently Google uses nearly 30% of the city's water supply:
https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2022/12/googles-wa...
I highly doubt any apartment block comes close to taking 30% of a city's water supply.
I’ve driven through The Dalles. It’s a very small town. A search shows a population of 15,000 and declining annually.
It’s also right on a big river. The article you linked said that Google was spending nearly $30 million to improve the city’s water infrastructure so there are no problems.
Talking about this in terms of percentages of a small town’s water supply while ignoring the fact that the city is literally on a giant river and Google is paying for the water infrastructure is misleading.
2/3rds of new data centers are built in areas of existing water scarcity.
The question was water spendinf per square meters compared to household. That question was answered and does not depend on proximity to river.
That's because it's a large industry and nobody lives there. This pattern appears all over the place. The paper mills in the pacific northwest consume large multiples of the water used by their little towns.
That's not the point, the question was whether an apartment building would use the same amount of water and clearly an apartment would consume substantially less water.
No, the question was whether "the same size space of apartments" (i.e. apartment buildings occupying the same land area as the datacenter) would use more or less water than the datacenter.
Under reasonable assumptions, the apartments would use more water.
- Google's datacenter complex in the Dalles covers ~190 acres.
- Typical density for apartment buildings is 50 units/acre, meaning you'd have 9,500 units on 190 acres.
- Average household size in the US is 2.5, so the 9,500 units would have a population of 23,750.
- According to the original article, per capita domestic water usage in the U.S. is 82 gallons per day, meaning a total water consumption of 710M gal/yr for the apartments. And this doesn't count the substantial indirect water usage you'd need to support this population.
- The Google datacenter uses 355M gal/yr (per the Oregonian article).
- 710M > 355M
Now, it would be somewhat ridiculous to replace the entire Google datacenter with apartment buildings in a rural town with declining population, but that was the original question...
If you replace the area of that data center with apartments, as the question suggested, it would add half again to the local population, which could indeed use 30% of the city water.
I'm not understanding the logic. You want to add more population to the city? That doesn't seem fair but I'll concede I may not understand the point you're trying to make.
Assuming that the population is the same in the city and you just move residents into an apartment complex. I don't understand how you would get the same water consumption, am I missing something? Evaporative cooling is extremely water heavy and these facilities also have the normal HVAC you'd expect. Everything just seems to point to more water usage not less.
Some quick napkin math using averages (data center designs vary). One of Google's larger and thirstier data centers, in Oklahoma, is said to use 833 million gallons per year (that's about 2500 acre-feet, in useful terms). It occupies about 250 acres, most of which looks to be parking lots but whatever. The number of households that can be supported on 1 acre-foot per year ranges from 2 to 6 depending (Las Vegas on one end, San Francisco on the other).
You said apartments specifically and this urban form usually starts at 50 dwellings per acre, minimum, which would lead me to say the apartments use more water. The break-even point in this equation is 2-5 households per acre.
Apples and oranges, you can compare the water usage, but places for people to live aren't in the same category as datacenters.
Yes they are. Both can be built in areas with abundant water supply.
With no AC and gas hot water, my monthly water bill is ~150% of my electric (that water cost is not including the wastewater that is billed on the water metering).
My water usage is pretty average and my electric usage is apparently hilariously low.
I live in the northwest US. My water bill is 110%-120% of my electric bill.
a datacenter getting "priority" over potable water to feed the data farms instead of, say, requiring "humans first, datacenter if there's any left"
It staggers me you’ve never wondered these things before.
You’re paying money and using resources and you’ve never looked into the details?
Living in Australia where both are expensive and very finite it’s a must.
I track my water usage and electricity usage every month. I'm confused why the cost ratio is off by an order of magnitude from the author. The base monthly charge of my water bill ignoring any usage is more then 10% of my largest electricity bill (so maybe that's the answer right there).
We have the fourth largest river basin in the world. And four mountain ranges.
> We can also think about it in economic terms. The 2.5 billion gallons per day required to grow cotton in the US created about six billion pounds of cotton in 2023, worth around $4.5 billion. Data centers, by contrast, are critical infrastructure for technology companies worth many trillions of dollars. Anthropic alone, just one of many AI companies, is already making $5 billion dollars every year selling access to its AI model. A gallon of water used to cool a data center is creating thousands of times more value than if that gallon were used to water a cotton plant.
Clothing is a basic human need, whereas data centres or AI are, well, not.
To reduce this to purely "economical value" is bizarre. This is "only madmen and economists believe in infinite growth" type stuff.
As for the rest, one of the concerns is that it adds demand to an already stressed system that struggle to meet the other needs – many of which are far more critical – especially during droughts. The proverbial straw that overflowed the bucket, so to speak. Stuff like "it's 6% of the water used by US golf courses" is far too broad because in some areas there are no water shortage problems and in others there are.
A huge part of the American economy (to take an example) is information services. Yes, we're also incredibly productive farmers, etc. But, a huuugge part of our wealth as a nation is making 'stuff' that isn't really 'stuff'.
We shouldn’t take these numbers blindly, but even if you think the value that Anthropic is providing is inflated by 10x due to it being a fad, that’s still 100x more value than cotton.
Market prices can be wrong, but I think it goes too far to completely disregard them and cut back on AI rather than cotton in places where there’s relatively little water. You can buy cotton from somewhere that has more water, rather than growing it in a desert.
> A gallon of water used to cool a data center is creating thousands of times more value than if that gallon were used to water a cotton plant.
This completely neglects that the cotton is sold for a profit and Anthropic is doing the equivalent of selling $6B for $5B. Looking at it that way, the water used to grow cotton is producing a lot more value.
The average American discards 80lb/year of clothing. That absolutely isn't serving a human need, that's plain overconsumption.
That number sounds impossible but I guess there must be some people that throw away a lot more clothes than I do.
I'm not sure I even own 80lbs of clothes.
Doesn't this value include unsold clothing?
Seems to me we need a better pricing system for water so the market can sort out if the application is valuable enough.
The water that cools the datacenter is one minor ingredient in the process. For the cotton plant it is one of the few, critical ingredients.
How is it a minor ingredient if the data center will not work without it? No datacenter can operate normally without a cooling system.
A cooling system can operate without water.
This would require a much larger area, because servers could not be mounted so densely. Air cooling can't achieve the same amount of heat transferred per unit volume as water cooling. Water has uniquely high specific heat.
Data center water consumption isn't due to it's use as a heat transfer medium, it's due to the evaporative cooling which cashes in water's enthalpy of vaporization.
Thr alternative would be to use a heat pump and spend electricity to cool the water that cools the servers.
Ah, I see. I keep thinking that modern datacenters would looks more like [1], or at least like [2], with direct water cooling. Supermicro servers and even Dell PowerEdge servers now have the direct water cooling option.
OTOH the cooling of the resulting hot water can be evaporative indeed :(
[1]: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/blackwell-platform-water-effic...
[2]: https://www.gigabyte.com/Enterprise/DLC-Rack
What a great article. Definitely bookmarking this for reference. People who oppose housing construction often invoke "but what about the water??" as their argument, while the fact is that California cities use less water per capita and overall than they did 50 years ago, almost entirely because of better toilets. The last couple of charts really highlight that trend.
Something else worth considering is that many uses at least in California are non-rivalrous. Reducing one water use does not necessarily create free supply of water for some other use, since water is a physical good that must be transported, refined, stored, and delivered. The best example of this is flood irrigation for rice in northern California. Bad optics, perhaps, but the fact is the rice is grown there because it was flooded in the first place. You can stop growing rice, and that will change one of the cells in your spreadsheet, but only because the spreadsheet model isn't quite right. You can also stop feeding cattle entirely and that isn't going to help cities with chronic supply problems, like Santa Barbara, nor will it benefit large urban systems like San Francisco and EBMUD who rely on dedicated alpine supplies.
> People who oppose housing construction often invoke "but what about the water??" as their argument, while the fact is that California cities use less water per capita and overall than they did 50 years ago, almost entirely because of better toilets.
Those people aren't talking about water use, but all the infrastructure around water. If you take a plot of land that used to be occupied by a couple of single family homes and want to build a multi-story apartment building on it, you need bigger, stronger water supply infrastructure to support all those new sinks. You need bigger, stronger sewage infrastructure to support all the new drains and toilets. Not to mention better electrical infra, different garbage disposal infra, and so on. While I'm generally supportive of "moar housing" you can't just plop the housing down and say job done. You need more of everything else peripheral to and supporting that housing.
Dense infra is easier and cheaper to build and maintain than inherently sprawling single family infra where you lay down a lot of material and fixed costs just to service each single home and the infra between them.
The tax base you have per meter of sprawling single family infra doesn't even necessarily cover the maintenance. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2024/4/1/heres-the-real-...
And "build moar housing" trivially entails "and the infra to go with it". You're making the opposite mistake by assuming that the solution we already have is somehow better and more affordable only by the virtue that we currently have it which would only make sense if there was no maintenance needed.
You, like them, are wrong, for reasons that I already explained. These urban systems were designed to deliver and were in fact delivering more water 50 years ago than they do currently. Much more. They are underutilized! Building the apartments only takes them marginally up in the direction of their design capacity.
In the case of LA they are underutilized compared to the past because of laws mainly. Hollywood reservoir was lowered in capacity due to the perceived risk of the dam design. Silverlake reservoir was disconnected from the drinking water system due to bromate buildup. LA aqueduct pulls less water than it did in the 1970s in effort to protect Mono lake and mitigate dust in the Owens valley.
Recent advances have been in using spill basins and other infrastructure to recharge groundwater after seasonal storms. During the last storm season, LA county captured 117 billion gallons of stormwater which they claim is enough for the yearly need of almost 3 million homes. Many projects are ongoing to improve this rate of catchment as the state is pushing for LA to meet most of its water needs locally over the next century.
This is why cities extract hookup fees they are designed to pay for this expansion.
Where i live the entire capital budget is paid by developer impact fees. The existing residents get a free ride.
> Average per-capita domestic water use in the US is 82 gallons per day. By comparison, German homes use around 33 gallons per person per day, UK homes use around 37 gallons, and French homes use around 39 gallons.
I want to know way more information about these figures... like, are there significant outliers? Drastically different usage profiles?
What they are calling “per capita domestic water use” is the per capita public+self supplied, which is not the same as home use. They sort of hand-wave over “most of this is used at home” but really it is inclusive of not only lawns (which are bigger in the US) but commercial use of water as well- commercial landscaping (far more in the US than in Europe) and other business use
Plumbing fixtures are also more regulated in the EU but I suspect this is a small portion relative to landscaping.
As with most things, I think there's multiple things. US home also tend to be larger, meaning the hot water line is longer from the tank to the shower. Most americans I know tend to leve the shower running before they get in so it "warms up". I've never been in a European shower that's required that.
Not just the bigger homes, from what I can tell in US home construction the length of the hot water pipe isn't a consideration at all, while it is a common consideration in European homes. In Europe (vast overgeneralization incoming) it's not unusual to have a boiler or a tankless water heater directly in the bathroom to keep the line short, and then have the kitchen close by. Having multiple water heaters per home is also completely normal and a common solution if the kitchen is too far from the bathroom or multiple bathrooms are far from each other. In the US the norm seems to be to just stick a big boiler in the basement or somewhere else out of the way, then run hot water lines everywhere. Maybe in part due to the added effort of running 220V lines in a 110V country
When I worked at a water treatment plant, we produced about 160 million gallons/day of water in the summer time, and only about 80 million gallons/day in the winter time. Now ask yourself what water-consuming activities happen in summer that don't happen in winter.
Primarily, lawns. It's lawns. Most of the international difference in water consumption I would chalk up to lawns, given that the US has much larger average lot sizes and a much larger proportion of detached single-family houses (i.e., houses sitting in the middle of a lawn) than European countries have.
I have a modest front and back yard in the "hot" part of the Bay Area. Summer months I'm pouring 5000 gallons a week to keep it moderately brown. It's insane.
Why keep it, then?
Not really just lawns, but irrigation specifically. I know a lot of people in my country that have detached houses with lawns. I know of no one that owns a sprinkler system. Dry years the lawn just goes a bit brown and no-one cares.
Everyone has a hose, they wash their car and water their flowers by hand.
And those lawns are typically grass. Even in almost desert like climates.
Grass is thirsty, very thirsty.
One thing that shocks me as an immigrant from Europe to the US is toilets. I have not seen a single one that has the two buttons, one for pee and one for the other stuff.
Every time I use the toilet it uses 1.6 gallons. 6 liters...
I think in my home country more than 90% of home toilets are the "low water usage one" (with 3 and 6 liters buttons)
And that's only the start, I noticed that people just don't care about water usage over here. People take water from wells with little oversight. In my home country you need a vast amount of bureaucracy to be allowed to take water from aquifers
The toilet flushing thing is performative. Even if toilet water usage were enough to be worth caring about, dual flush toilets use more water over the lifetime of the toilet, because the more complex designs have a higher failure rate: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/29/dual-flu...
Also, in about half of the country, aquifers replenish as fast as they are used, so there's no point in regulating their use. The largest concern is usually whether or not the well is contaminated.
Say every single one of the 330 million people in America flushes a toilet five times a day, every day of the year.
That’s still less than a cubic mile of water. Lake Mead, by comparison, has a volume of 7 cubic miles. Every American could go back to using outhouses and the water savings wouldn’t even be noticeable.
People are not very good at visualizing this stuff. The volumes involved are hard to grasp.
Or think of it this way: if you personally saved all that water by using an outhouse, it would amount to less than 300 gallons a month. My water bill doesn’t even show usage at a resolution high enough to see those savings. I’m billed per 1,000 gallons.
If the water company doesn’t care enough to track it and charge me for it, it’s noise.
For what it's worth there are other considerations like wastewater processing capacity, especially when it rains
See e.g. https://www.nyc.gov/assets/dep/downloads/pdf/whats-new/progr...
https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/shared-sewer-systems-househ...
https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-rctom/submission/the-dirty-t...
EU put forwards some Eco labeling thing in 2013 to encourage toilet manufacturers to get eco certified and people buy the stuff (though it was already common long before 2013)
Regulation can be for the greater good, and in this case it's not even mandatory.
I feel like there's a cultural difference where wastefulness is frowned upon at home but encouraged in the US. Big cars, big trucks(cars), big trucks(lorries), big (green)lawns, big roads, big houses, big servings, drive everywhere, fly everywhere, no trains, no public transport.
Everything is big except infrastructure unrelated to cars. Except for some cool dams built before something shifted.
And as others mentioned, the "water rights" which can be traded(bought up) by some evil megacorp instead of benefiting local farmers and population becaue ownership trumps everything.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/ALL/?uri=CELEX:32...
Interesting. I feel like the majority of toilets (in my US city) have both buttons and it's been that way for almost a decade.
The only time they don't is when it's a toilet that's over 10 years old.
I could be wrong, especially since I mostly just use my own toilet (has two buttons, is 6 years old) or a urinal.
Maybe it's because in the northeast rains so much that people here think water is unlimited
Could be, but I live in Seattle. It's not exactly dry here.
The two button toilets are around, but I agree that they aren't the standard.
Also, wells are regulated in the US, with the exception of low-producing home wells. Even then, they require permitting (the degree of difficulty depends largely upon the state in question). Larger-producing wells have all kinds of reporting and usage requirements associated with them, and water rights can be the most valuable part of a plot of land.
Water and the control of it is the story of the modern American West. Even today, there are a couple of folks up in a coastal community in my county who are fighting to be able to build single family homes on property they bought decades ago. The issue is, you guessed it, water.
Maybe there are regs on appliances in Europe, or maybe the prices are high enough that the market demands efficient appliances (like gas/petrol). Whenever I stay in an airbnb in europe, whether it is a fancy place or a cheap apartment, all the appliances look similarly small and water efficient. The washing machine, flushing, hot water heaters, etc. can all add up. To wit, there is no uniform water efficiency requirements in the US.
It’s probably the lawns and yards, primarily. Including things like pools: in Arizona there’s about one pool for every 13 people. The US averages much larger lot sizes, and those yards consume water.
I’m not saying the US isn’t profligate in other areas like appliances or taking longer showers, but in most the country there’s so much land, such cheap water and very little regulation preventing you from using however much water that you want. Some of the land even comes with a guaranteed quantity of water for irrigation guaranteed, at little to no cost.
I recently looked up whether it would be worth it to me to install a water meter instead of paying a flat-rate. Apparently the flat rate is calculated on a consumption of avout half a cubic meter per day. But, without a water meter, I can only guess if my consumption is more or less than that. My guess is that it's considerably less though.
I live in California, where half of the state is a desert half is a rainforest. The politicians here like to think that everyone lives in urban desert cities built on fault lines next to pyrophytic forests, so our regulations assume that every household needs earthquake proofing, fire proofing, thick insulation, and major urban planning.
I live in an area where pretty much non of those things matter, but one of the regulations that stands out the most is that the water everywhere has to be metered, even though the reserviour near me regularly has to be drained, because it's to full to make it through the wet season.
My water districts solution was to set the price per unit of water at cost, so I pay $40/mo for insfrastructure, and a dollar or two for water. If I quadrupled my water consumption, I wouldn't even notice the price change. I actually pay more to service the meters than I pay for water.
Agrigulture uses more water than households, but accounts for 0% of the population, making per capita usage a worthless metric.
All this does is reflect that Germany imports agriculture, while the US exports it.
A pretty common stat is that the us is ~5% of the world’s population and uses up ~95% of the world’s resources that are used annually.
In terms of energy use it's more like 4% of the population uses 16% of the resources. Still 4 to 1, but not 19 to 1.
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=87
Per capita, that rate puts the US in 10th place.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use
That can't possibly be true. Yeah the US is inefficient but there's no way Europe + Japan + China collectively use only 5% of the world's resources.
I was curious about the "US Thermal Power Plant Water Use By County" graph which has a very dark square in the SE corner of NC. It's Brunswick County. I guess it's due to the Brunswick Nuclear Generating Station:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunswick_Nuclear_Generating_S...
The water supply in Brunswick County is terribly polluted by PFAS (courtesy of DuPont, not the power plant):
https://www.nrdc.org/stories/drinking-water-crisis-north-car...
I'm somewhat astonished at the per-capita household use of water per day. I assume it must mostly be for watering lawns?
We have a swimming pool that leaks (we were quoted $125k to fix it since the deck will need replacing, and with interest rates being what they are, borrowing to fix it would be rather painful), and we use only 51gal/person/day at our home. I estimate that if fixing the pool would save another 10.
> I'm somewhat astonished at the per-capita household use of water per day. I assume it must mostly be for watering lawns?
I'd assume so. Would be interesting to see the water usage comparison between city dwellers and suburbanites.
Toilets (1.5 - 2.5 g per flush), then showers (2.5 g per minute), then clothes washer (about 15 - 20 g per load) are the big 3.
If you do 1 load of laundry per person per day (which is absurd), then the clothes washer cant' be even 1/4 of the over 80 gallons per person per day TFA claims.
Lawns use such an incredible amount of water, particularly people maintaining them in deserts, like in Arizona and parts of California. It boggles my mind that people go out of their way to put so much effort and resources just into having grass in front of their house that they mostly don't use.
Honestly, if you're maintaining a lawn in places that don't get year-round rain, you need to water it. I grew up in Seattle and it never occurred to me that there were places where you didn't need to water a lawn.
> Honestly, if you're maintaining a lawn in places that don't get year-round rain, you need to water it.
Only if you want to grow non-native species and always have it looking like a magazine cover.
My house is sitting in a five acre clearing covered in whatever flora decides to grow there, with minimal "curation" (tend to avoid cutting beautiful native flowers to encourage them to spread, do try and deal with removing things like poison ivy).
When it rains, everything greens up, grows quickly, needs lots of mowing. If it doesn't rain for a few weeks while the sun cooks it, some things will go a bit brown and lifeless. Then the next rain comes and it all perks right back up. When winter comes, it all sits under the snow for months and months and when the snow melts it picks right back up where it left off.
Most of these plants were here before we were and they'll be here after. They don't need my help.
> If it doesn't rain for a few weeks while the sun cooks it, some things will go a bit brown and lifeless. Then the next rain comes and it all perks right back up.
You're right that "only if you want to grow non-native species" because of course a "lawn" in an area where it will die in the summer is by definition non-native.
But you're missing the point about climate, because not raining "for a few weeks" is not the same as living in a place as "wet" as the northwest where it still doesn't rain a drop for 3-4 months in the summer.
I guess my general question in those scenarios is why spend time and water maintaining a lawn of plants that can't grow normally in the local climate? There are definitely plants which survive in the area year round in many places in the US.
It's an expectation. Sometimes just peer-pressure, sometimes with legal backing (there are many HOAs that require lawns, sometimes with a specific list of allowed grasses).
I haven't investigated it because I don't have kids, but I think whatever comprises a typical domestic lawn is a better play/recreation surface than any kind of plants that are native out west.
I think the alternative is artificial surfaces which of course have benefits and drawbacks.
I'm hoping to replace my lawn with low/no-water alternatives soon, but, hey, landscaping is expensive.
yeah, our small suburban house in silicon valley can easily use 400 gallons per day on days where we water the small front and back lawns and drip irrigation, but on a non-watering day, we can use as little as 50 gallons for 2 people.
While this is "a lot" of water, when we've had an irrigation leak in a zone that runs for 5 or 10 minutes, the number can balloon to 900 gallons in a day.
The amount of water used by people who actually don't closely monitor and track their usage, with big properties, lots of plants and lawn to irrigate, must be truly mind-boggling. I wouldn't be surprised if tens of thousands of gallons per day was pretty common at a lot of houses.
> The closest thing the federal government has to a department of water infrastructure, the Bureau of Reclamation, has an annual budget of just $1.1 billion.
One of my favorite books is Cadillac Desert. It's about the damming of the US rivers, the water crisis, and the history of the Bureau.
It may be dwarfed by the other departments, but its had a massive impact on US population development especially in LA.
> From 1902 to 1905, Eaton, Mulholland, and others engaged in underhanded methods to ensure that Los Angeles would gain the water rights in the Owens Valley, blocking the Bureau of Reclamation from building water infrastructure for the residents in Owens Valley.[12]: 48–69 [16]: 62–69 While Eaton engaged in most of the political maneuverings and chicanery,[16]: 62 Mulholland misled Los Angeles public opinion by dramatically understating the amount of water then available for Los Angeles' growth.[16]: 73 Mulholland also misled residents of the Owens Valley; he indicated that Los Angeles would only use unused flows in the Owens Valley, while planning on using the full water rights to fill the aquifer of the San Fernando Valley. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Mulholland
This is the Mulholland of Mulholland Drive who was a major character in CD
For many years, they piped the entirety of the Owens River to LA, over a hundred miles away and over a mountain range. It is wild that the follies of Los Angeles water management has led to permanent scars in the east side of California from Mono Lake to the Salton Sea disaster.
Potter's analysis of the various consumptive uses of water relies on the USGS survey data of the uses of water, generally a good source. However, there is a small flaw when we try to turn consumptive use into consumption, which is alluded to but not quantified in the USGS report: water losses to evaporation during storage (in reservoirs) and transportation. This is discussed in e.g.:
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/99/1/bams-d-...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00344... (translation: 33.73e9 m^3/yr ≈ 24400 Mgal/day, roughly corn + alfalfa + steel)
Much of the literature is preliminary and recommends further study, but the initial estimates indicate that the amount of water that is simply lost from reservoirs is surprisingly large. So I like to yak about covering reservoirs (possibly with solar panels), which won't solve everything, but it has a far larger impact than data centers.
Aside: metric, please!
> Water in the US is generally both widely available and inexpensive: my monthly water bill is roughly 5% of the cost of my monthly electricity bill, and the service is far more reliable.
In my experience with municipal utility districts, the reliability of the water supply is typically not much better than the local power grid. The sewage lift stations seem to have the highest quality generator arrangements.
> In my experience with municipal utility districts, the reliability of the water supply is typically not much better than the local power grid.
Both of these services have been phenomenally reliable everywhere I’ve lived in the United States. The only exception was in a town where we’d get ice storms once a year that would bring trees down on top of power lines, but it was shocking how quickly a truck would show up and fix them all.
I can’t actually think of a time my water has stopped working anywhere except once when the road was torn up and pipes had to be replaced. I wasn’t home, we just got letters explaining when it would happen and how to flush the pipes when it was done.
At least from what I've seen in my area, interruptions in water service don't result in a lack of pressure or flow, they result in contamination, and the water districts have to issue boil water orders. It's not a problem you would notice, and if you don't pay attention to local news, you might just end up drinking contaminated water.
In the small town I lived in, we'd pretty frequently get water boiling notifications with our old water tower. Once that was replaced we never got a water boiling notice.
It's interesting you said that. My experience is the opposite. In my last 10 years in California, I've had power outages a couple times a year (mostly due to storm / trees falling on the electrical lines). But I don't recall a time I got water cut off.
Water in the US is generally both widely available and inexpensive: my monthly water bill is roughly 5% of the cost of my monthly electricity bill, and the service is far more reliable.
Is this the norm for most places in the US?
Where I live our water/sewer bill averages out to a little over $100 a month.
Where do you live? I don't think I've ever lost water without a power outage.
I've never lost water, period, and I've had multi-day power outages.
Really? I've never turned my tap and and not had water come out. But we get several power outages per year.
Water infrastructure outages are typically due to failures needing repairs (relevant to this discussion: water main breaks which lead to boil water advisories). Few municipalities are fiscally responsible enough to invest in all the preventative maintenance required to completely avoid failures across all types of infrastructure (a low-priority budget item when things are working smoothly), but it also takes decades for water mains to fail.
Vox did a great video visualizing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0gN1x6sVTc&ab_channel=Vox
It said 41% of the water used in the US is for thermo electric cooling. Albeit, it didn't break this down into saltwater vs freshwater. It also said the vast majority of this water usage is due to older plants that did not recirculate the water. The newer plants that recirculate the water only used a tiny fraction of water in comparison.
So...if the US replaces all of its old nuclear power plants, we would free up almost 40% of water used today?
Note that water use is not the same as water consumption. If 100 gallons of water passes through a heat exchanger and 99 gallons go back into the river, only then 100 gallons were used but only 1 gallon was consumed. Thermoelectric cooling makes up a lot of water use, but on 1-2% of water consumption because most of the used water is returned: https://watercalculator.org/footprint/water-use-withdrawal-c...
Furthermore, heat exchangers can use wastewater. This is done at the Palo Verde nuclear plant, for example.
Thanks. So the water of water consumed is by agriculture and “public use”.
More importantly, though, is that agricultural water is mostly consumption. That water is either evaporated or absorbed by plants.
By contrast, the overwhelming majority of water used by thermoelectric plants is not consumed. Electricity generation amounts to 1-2% of water consumption. There's hardly any water to be saved by changing power generation.
Thermoelectric cooling's 41% includes all thermal plants (coal, gas, nuclear), and most of this water is withdrawn but returned to source, not consumed - so modernizing would reduce withdrawals but not free up that water for other consumptive uses.
Thanks.
How did you go from "thermoelectric" to "nuclear"? The US has nearly as much coal power as nuclear power, and significantly more natural gas than nuclear.
I assumed only nuclear power plants need that much water for cooling. It is only an assumption. If I am wrong I am happy to be corrected.
I don't have numbers to quote at you, but I would assume not. Fundamentally coal, nuclear, and gas-boiler (but not gas-turbine) power plants work the same way - you heat up water until it boils, and run the steam through a turbine to turn that heat into mechanical energy. I.e. the "cooling" is also the electricity generation mechanism. As a result same amount of heat should result in the basically same amount of electricity for each process, and since the water is being used in the same way they should be pretty much equal in water (use or consumption)/electricity output efficiency assuming they were built with the same era of technology...
I was mentally referring to this article. It mentioned that natural gas plants only used one tenth that of coal. I assumed this is because natural gas plants are newer etc.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50698
Yeah, that's the gas turbine thing. The first-stage (which generates the majority of the power) isn't boiling water, but extracting energy directly from pressure from burning the gas in a jet-engine like fashion.
The coal/nuclear like natural gas is what is labelled as "Steam Turbine" in the chart in this article: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61444
Looks like it's already a small minority.
Coal and natural gas also emit some of their waste heat in the outgoing exhaust gases. Nuclear doesn't have exhaust gases (aside from evaporated cooling water) to carry away waste heat.
The big difference is the much lower thermal efficiency of LWR power plants.
Pretty much every power plant heats water to steam, then uses steam turbines to generate power. This is also how nuclear submarines and arcraft carriers work.
We never left the steampunk era.
We're leaving it now, the majority of new energy capacity is now solar, and not steam based (>70% in 2024). And a non-trivial chunk of the remainder is wind (also not steam based).
And in the US of the part that's still fossil based, new capacity is combustion turbine based, which at most gets a minority share of its power from a steam bottoming cycle.
> if the US replaces all of its old nuclear power plants, we would free up almost 40% of water used today?
FTFA: “thermoelectric power plants — plants that use heat to produce steam to drive a turbine.”
Interesting that the infographic (which I thought was exceptionally well-designed, well done USGS) found it necessary to call out that 0 billion gallons/day goes to Mexico. Was this done by previous or this administration I wonder? I do recall reading something about disputes between US and Mexico over abstraction. (Presumably from Rio Grande or similar).
It might be because there used to be a significant flow from the Colorado river into Mexico. But we extract so much that that's gone dry before it reaches the border.
Also, it might be just to show that the other landmass neighboring is not getting anything.
"The US has around 16,000 golf courses, and collectively they use about a billion gallons of water a day, or around 0.3% of total US water use."
I say that's a darn good use of water. Fore!
I recently learned that Las Vegas recycles 100% of its drinking water.
I guess that explains why the water there tastes so nasty. The only places in the US that I ever seek out bottled water are Las Vegas and Phoenix. The water in both places tastes nasty and often comes out of the tap very warm..
Orange County California does the same. Injects treated wastewater back into the aquifer. Largest toilet to tap system in the world.
"Toilet to Tap" would be a great name for a California brewpub.
My local brewery made a beer out of recycled water. It's not legal to sell, though.
https://www.devilscanyon.com/epic-onewater-brew.html
Can anybody explain why water used by data centers is considered as disappeared/consumed? Isnt it possible to reuse it for irrigation?
TFA says:
> Per Lawrence Berkeley Lab[1], in 2023, data centers used around 48 million gallons of water a day directly for cooling. Most of this water will evaporate as part of the cooling process[2], and is thus consumed.
[1]: https://eta-publications.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12...
[2]: https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/04/how_datacenters_use_w...
I'm from the Netherlands. The last few years there have been issues with ground water levels dropping and a lack of rainfall. To the point where water companies are asking consumers to reduce their water use for e.g. irrigating their gardens, shower less long, etc.
Of course, the notion of a water shortage in a country where two of the largest rivers in Europe empty in the North Sea and that keeps about a third of it's land that lies below sea levels dry by actively pumping relatively clean water out is a bit of a weird notion to sell. We have a surplus of water, not a shortage. Rivers overflowing their dikes is an issue we deal with regularly. And a lot of infrastructure to dump that into the North Sea by the millions of liters per day.
The issue isn't that there isn't more clean water than we can handle but that more water gets taken from limited ground water reserves than is added back naturally. This would be a non-issue if we'd mostly use surface water instead.
Most of this ground water isn't even used by consumers but by agriculture. And worse, farmers also work very hard to keep their land dry after irrigating it because they need the ground to be moist, not soaking wet as in a swamp. The water that they drain is very high in nutrients because they are using a lot of fertilizer too. So, basically, agriculture is in the business of taking rain water that dumps on their land and surrounding lands and basically dumping it into rivers without even using it for irrigation. But then when it doesn't rain, they use ground water to irrigate, which then drains into rivers. As a result, nature is suffering because ground water levels are dropping and because surface water is polluted. Ground water is also used for consumers.
The solution is of course to use slightly more expensive to use water from e.g. surface water or rain water (which is generally drained to get rid of it ASAP). Of course a lot of that water isn't as easy to access everywhere so it requires infrastructure (pipes) or storage (reservoirs). But historically, ground water was there and relatively clean (so it can be used without much processing) and people just use it without thinking about it. Most people with gardens don't even capture the water that falls on their roofs, which on an annual basis should be plenty to water their gardens. Neither are they (re)using grey water or rain water for e.g. flushing their toilets. All of that is done using tap water that comes from ground water.
This isn't a shortage crisis but a water abuse crisis. The solution is being a bit smarter about what water we use for which purpose. And a lot of that is rethinking intensive agriculture. We grow crops to feed cattle that produces so much manure that we have severe nitrogen pollution getting in the way of economic growth because we have to limit construction in/near polluted areas. Those crops uses ground water and feed the cattle. The problems are connected.
The reason we have water "issues" in California is due to a complicated system of water rights, where more "senior" and upstream water rights-holders can take as much as they want.
Of course, if we nullified that system, we'd have a new problem; lack of agriculture.
Interesting article, but those cumulative maps are... not so useful. They're straight up from https://www.reddit.com/r/xkcd/comments/13nm1o/heatmap/
With the rise in climate change and _collective inaction_. We are in a trajectory for mass extinction [1].
With the second AI gold rush coming to a near abrupt stop, political climates worsening, billionaires continuing to loot the collective populace through their pawns in the kakistocracy (USA) and kleptocracy (Russia). We are absolutely cooked.
What’s the point anymore? What are we even solving? Being a _good_ person is no longer worth any value. Just exploit and climb over each other like crabs in barrel.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/09/1...
It's true that we were all sold the lie of individual actions being the way to solve the climate crisis (recycling, turning off lights, etc.) But I think the conclusion is to try other strategies rather than giving up when the first strategy didn't work.
> We are in a trajectory for mass extinction
Birth rates are below replacement nearly everywhere. That’s going to cause extinction far sooner than climate change will.
The whole debate is retarded and only real because we try to shut down our power plants so we can’t have large scale desalination. When I was younger I hoped that all these degrowthers would just age out. But it turns out young people keep filling in the ranks.
The interesting thing is watching as they all complain about the consequences of stifling growth without realizing that’s what’s happening.
“I don’t want any more housing here. It’s too expensive”
Totally retarded but fortunately I’ve figured out my way around this stuff.