A.I. tools fueled a 34% spike in Microsoft’s water consumption, and one city with its data centers is concerned about the effect on residential supply
A.I. tools fueled a 34% spike in Microsoft’s water consumption, and one city with its data centers is concerned about the effect on residential supply
“They were pretty secretive on what they’re doing out there,” says a former mayor about Microsoft’s data center projects.
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If it's just for cooling, wouldn't they just be able to pull water directly from a lake and then return the same water into the lake? Why is any consumption happening?
In theory, yes. Of course, the same holds true for a lot of things which we currently use clean water for! The water needs of agriculture, toilets, carwashes, and many more could be addressed through so-called graywater (e.g.: pumped lakewater, rooftop rainwater) if we really sat down and wanted to make it happen.
The reason that we don't do these things is rather mundane: it's cheaper and easier to tap into the shared drinking water infrastructure than it is to collect your own water and roll your own silos/filtration tech. That might change as the world changes -- something has to give eventually if we use more groundwater than we replenish, but much like clean drinking water, I don't think it's a problem we should ask individual entities to solve. Governments would generally be much more suited to efficiently collecting drainwater, scrubbing it, distributing it, and mandating usage in wasteful commercial applications.
A lot of problems we don’t solve boil down to “it’s boring and expensive” lol it’s sad when you think about it. Everyone says they want infrastructure investment because they think it sounds mature or whatever, but when the day comes, they shake their heads.
I wonder what the practical implementation would be here. I assume current water infrastructure is two sets of pipes, one for clean water and one for wastewater. Would the solution here be to add a third parallel set of pipes for greywater?
It probably doesn't make sense to do infrastructure -wide duplication for a greywater system. That would be a lot of pipe and possible leaks in places where that resource isn't needed.
Smaller loops make more sense for specific needs like this. It just needs to be legislated - over a certain size, you need to pump, filter if required for your application, and then dump in accordance with whatever rules we set. If local governments want, they can subsidize this through tax breaks - we already have robust systems for giving corporations money back, we just need to tie it to the types of performance we need to see, whether that be environmental improvements, job creation/retention, etc.
Dirty water is bad for cooling equipment
Well, building on that question, why do they need a constant supply of clean water? My desktop PC has a water cooler, and it just recirculates the same water.
Because that's expensive to build on this scale. They'd have to cool the water back down again.
It's cheaper to just run cold tapwater in at a fast rate, and dump the hot water intothe sewer.
Which is why we need laws that go after industries that use insane amounts of water, if we don't it causes shortages and everyone's rate to go up
It’s cheaper to just run cold tapwater in at a fast rate, and dump the hot water into the sewer.
There should be a cost to corporations using municipal water supplies for purposes unrelated to direct consumption for drinking, cooking, washing, toilets. You shouldn't be able to use it for cooling only, and you shouldn't be able to bottle and resell it.
you shouldn't be able to bottle and resell it.
Dasani and Aquafina in shambles
Nestlé heavy breathing
We should make it exponentially more expensive the more you use.
There's probably some alternate uses for the heat if these things were well designed. There's some building in denver that is near a major sewer and in the winter they use a heat exchanger to extract that energy and use it to heat the building.
Nah, it's because of the volume.
You don't cool down hot water with the same amount of cool water. You use a shit ton of cool water, because the larger the difference in temps the faster the heat exchange.
So the discharge isn't water that's really hot. It's just warmer than when it went in.
Maybe 5-10 degrees, which is enough for a negative environmental impact if constantly discharged into a lake/ocean/river, but not hot enough to be good for anything.
They could do large underground reserve for cold water, cool their servers with it, then dump it into a second tank that eventually cools and is added to the reserve. It's not complicated, but it is a huge upfront cost.
Companies aren't going to do it when they can pay a fraction of the cost even tho it fucks over everyone else. This is capitalism, we need regulations forcing them to do the right thing over the cheap thing.
I suppose that's very true. But it could be done - if a data center needs megawatts of cooling and is in an area where buildings need to be heated in the winter, then there should be a legal obligation to not just dump that heat.
Pumping 80 degree water outside of a building in winter isn't going to help anyone...
That's right in the range for subfloor heating, obviously a question of whether or not you can get it somewhere that you need it
Sounds like they are using evaporation cooling towers for the air chillers.
It’s evaporative cooling, big cooling towers
Power plants use lake water directly for cooling - they use a heat exchanger
The water isn't being consumed. It's going through the same process all the water in the city is going through.
Pulled from the river, cleaned, used for cooling at the data centers, and returned to the river via the waste water system.
The only loss is the energy/resources to treat the water.