> 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 â many of which are far more critical â 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.
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.
> 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?
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...
> 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]: 48â69 [16]: 62â69 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
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 â 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!
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.
> 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.
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?
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).
I recently learned that Las Vegas recycles 100% of its drinking water.
"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!
Can anybody explain why water used by data centers is considered as disappeared/consumed? Isnt it possible to reuse it for irrigation?
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.
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.
Whatâs 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...
The whole debate is retarded and only real because we try to shut down our power plants so we canât 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 thatâs whatâs happening.
âI donât want any more housing here. Itâs too expensiveâ
Totally retarded but fortunately Iâve 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 donât need to be concerned at all about water use. But while water may not get destroyed, it can get âused upâ 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.