Google datacenters use 'a quarter of all water' in one US city Google has disclosed how much water its datacenters consume, following a legal battle between a local media outlet and the city of The Dalles in Oregon, which sought to keep the information confidential. The figures show that the search giant consumed 274.5 million gallons (about 1.2 billion liters) of water during 2021 at its …
The reason the DC's are there is due to the massive and cheap hydro power from the Columbia river, and they are trying to squeeze every penny out of it.
What is a little surprising is that there isn't more water re-use happening in the system, and I wonder if some of that is "out of scope" for the report. The output from the Google site may be going straight into wastewater reclamation not back in the river, and may be offsetting other municipal or private water use as a result.
Or not, but unlike a fab, which needs large amounts of high purity water as input which then gets loaded with all kinds of chemical contaminants that aren't always easy to remove in a closed loop system, the DC should be generating more waste as heat then as chemicals. So even if it is open loop now, much of that load should be possible to shift to closed-loop operation. The DC is literally next to the river, so I am a little surprised to hear they are pulling that much water from the potable water supply, but the EPA may have had words about them diverting river water directly.
Them might have also determined the cost and environmental impact of doing water processing at the municipal plant was less than building a smaller version of the same thing on the DC lot. Be interested to see a follow up article on this.
They can, but won't because of cost.
Put it this way - we all understand that you either need to take the heat out or bring something colder in.
Mains water is colder, and fairly cheap*,
So you bring in the water and transfer the heat to it,
And then... then you just dump the "used" water out because it's cheaper to bring in new cold water than it is to re-cool the existing water.
*cheap in terms of cost, not in terms of depriving local residents of water
They're evaporating the water to cool the data center. It's far more efficient than dry cooling (and the capital costs are less). It lets the air-conditioners run at lower condensing temperatures.
As with many environmental decisions there are tradeoffs. Most engineers would see this as standard.
In time they'll fund reclamation projects that will give back more water locally than they take out.
Cloud DCs are almost always more efficient than the on-premise DCs they replace. So big headline figures of growth/usage aren't necessarily always a bad thing.
"This may sound like a lot (and it is), but to put it in perspective, Google claims that the total annual water consumption of its datacenter operations is comparable to the water footprint of 29 golf courses in the southwest US."
I hate golf as well.
Have these people never heard of a closed loop system?
Or just put a Google datacenter on every golf course, then use the waste water from said datacenter for irrigation. Of the golf course. Maybe the players too. One could even use excess heat for district heating.
And you piss off golf players at the same time. Two birds with one stone I'd say.
https://direct.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/itasca-golf-course-data-center-plans-resubmitted-still-face-resistance-locals/
If the water is already evaporating on scale, then there are some pretty interesting situations to consider.
If the evaporation is indoors, the humidity of the data centers would increase and cause condensation.
If the water is at a high enough temperature to evaporate, there is potential for extremely low cost water filtration within a farm. The water released from the data centers could be pumped into pools within green houses with properly shaped roofs and the water would evaporate and slide down the sides of the system and be reclaimed. While doing so, it would also cool slightly.
In that same system, the water as it falls and cools can be used to turn low resistance turbines and the energy can be collected. The additional energy removed from the water in the process would be a few more degrees of temperature.
An evaporator system the size of several indoor Olympic swimming pools could be incredibly profitable to everyone involved.
I don't think the water is quite ready for mass evaporation, when that much water is carrying that much energy, only fools would pass up the opportunity to reclaim as much of it as possible. In fact, making sure that the evaporator system can collect even more energy from the sun would make it vastly more profitable.
I think there has to be a reason the water and energy isn't being reclaimed. Either
- they are using so much water that the heat is being broadly distributed enough that it doesn't actually evaporate easily and as such energy isn't easily extracted
- they are mixing the potable water with non-potable water
- they are mixing potable water with chemicals
One thing I know for sure from following some pretty interesting people who talk about DC engineering, they can't account for pretty much every milliwatt of potential energy savings within a datacenter. If there is a penny to be saved or made by exploiting the waste output of a data center, they will find it and exploit it.
I know about the litre, don't know what a liter is.
With such quantities, using cubic metre (m3) would be more appropriate.
The conversion formula isn't that hard to remember:
1 m3 = 1,000 L
1 L = 1 dm3 = 0.001 m3
Looking at Google's data, does that mean that 1,200,000 m3 of water evaporate in their datacentres? Or is this the quantity of water entering in them?
== Bring us Dabbsy back! ==
1.2 million tonnes.
Please.
So brief and comprehensible.
The Register really needs a code of conduct on units. Press releases tend to units that sound big (for the output of a fission experiment) or American like the acre foot when it comes to really big amounts of water (for instance behind the Hoover Dam.)
Gallons are also used when "they" want to make the number sound big - and American.
The consumption of the current plant under discussion is (suspiciously) very close to 1,000 acre feet.
doesn't mean that it goes up in smoke after a single use.
Google (probably wastefully) pulls the h2o from a reservoir or aquifer, runs it through equipment chillers, and then dumps it back into the 'environment' for the next user to claim temporary use of those very same molecules over and over again.
I suspect that there isn't a single reader here, including the more emotional/obtuse ones, that don't know this.
The wisdom of Google placing itself in the water usage supply chain like this is certainly a source for lively debate as is the question of how efficiently Google is using water and energy resources in order to track little Johnny's mobile device and web browser statistics and if that usage is of overall benefit to society.
Oregon has a lot of water. The area in question COULD be considered a semi-desert, due to getting only half the rainfall Portland gets, but it has this massive river (The Columbia) running right next door and a number of streams and rivers carrying snowmelt from Mt. Hood down to the Columbia.
The Dalles municipal water comes from wells (intersecting sub-surface water on its way to or from the Columbia) and surface streams from Mount Hood. There is no lack of water, if not all of it is potable without treatment.
The Dalles has a population of 16,000, so Google is using the water of 4,000 people.
So? This area has more water than it can use, and unless Google is actually putting a strain on the local supply (I doubt it), then it is just 'borrowing' water on its way to the mighty Columbia, and warming it up slightly. The dilution of this 'warmed' water in the Columbia is such that the thermal impact should be negligible.
Can't think of a greener way to cool a datacenter.
Are they seriously just like running it through the colling system once then like spraying it into the air or what? My cars have all used water cooling, and other than the sh**ty Dodge Shadow I had that ridiculously blew the head gasket, I have not had to keep adding water to any of them. (The Shadow started visibly spraying coolant out the side of the block and also was pissing it away into the cylinders just as fast, which is why I say it blew it ridiculously.) Are they seriously just running water through the cooling system once then dumping it? Highly inefficient, especially if they're using potable water (presumably water treated by the local water treatment plant) for it.
It was always cheaper for large power stations to use cooling ponds or direct outlets if the water was available.
Large cooling towers were always expensive, but because of "Legionnaires disease", it's rather more expensive and complicated to run cooling towers than it used to be.
(Also, the 'steam' coming out of those large cooling towers was a marketing disaster. People always thought it was 'smoke')
That explains a lot: after we took over the house from our landlord, the power and water and district heating people came and changed all the meters because their computers insisted our usage of all three was 'unreasonable'. I've just seen the actual numbers; we use less than half what he and his family did.
Obviously he was running a server farm in the cellar.
“In the UK, Thames Water, which serves parts of London and the Thames Valley, announced earlier this year that it has begun efforts to try and quantify how much water is being used by datacenters within its area of coverage, and said it wanted to work with operators to reduce their overall water usage.”
Water meters.
You’re welcome.
Users entering a keyword in Ecosia essentially see the same results as via Bing, including the ads. When someone clicks on an ad in Ecosia, Microsoft earns money, according to Kroll, but Ecosia gets a large portion of the sales
No thanks.
I plant stuff directly in my garden. No intermediary to fatten up.
== Bring us Dabbsy back! ==
As many here point out, the water isn't consumed in the sense that it becomes something else.
The issue, as seen from Google's weak qualification, is about potable water. The concern is reducing the potable water avaialable to residents, either through contamination or displacement - the vapour isn't necessarily coming back to the same place, as rainfall.
"Use" is also a proxy for all of the environmental impacts from what they are doing with the water.
What this story highlights to me is that city council needs to manage that problem instead of sticking their heads up Google's "competitive secrets" hidey hole.
Actually, in this area the weather typically moves West-to-East. Not always, of course, but it is the dominate weather pattern with systems coming in from the Pacific Ocean and moving in-land.
The Columbia river flows East-to-West. Thus any water vapor evaporated by the data center is likely to fall upstream in the Columbia River's drainage system, and will flow right back through The Dalles at some point.
One should probably remember that The Dalles only makes it to "city" status because of weird American municipal-government technicalities. "City" in the US doesn't mean what you probably think it does. By anyone else's standard, The Dalles barely makes it to "small town" with its population of 16,010.
The Dallas, OR is located on the Columbia River. In December the river is discharging around 130,000 cubic feet of water per second. That translates in to around 975,000 gallons.
The article reports the data center used 274.5 million gallons per year. That is around 280 seconds of river flow.
Put this data center in Phoenix, Los Angeles, or Albuquerque and you might have a news story. On the banks of a major waterway, and this is a non-issue. Creates good eco-drama for the greenies though.
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