Hi there everyone,
Let me start this by saying that this is an honest question. I figure nobody would be better suited to answer my question than a group laser-focused on the negatives of the technology.
I see these types of memes a lot and see statistics of gallons consumed in a lot of articles I read. What I don’t understand though is where the water goes that it can’t be reclaimed or naturally return from a gas to a liquid.
As a kid(long ago), I was taught of the cycle of rain and the conversion between gases and liquid. It’s my understanding that when a liquid is used to cool something, it also follows the same conversion process as it cools.
Could someone explain to me what’s going on in this process where the 264 billion gallons of water used in the meme do not return to a liquid state?
I would appreciate any insight into the process that seems to defy this cycle that I am missing. Like I said prior, my knowledge of this process ended in middle school science class so I’m confident that I’m missing something.
Thanks for your time!
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As a kid (long ago), I was taught of the cycle of rain and the conversion between gases and liquid. It’s my understanding that when a liquid is used to cool something, it also follows the same conversion process as it cools.
Yeah the water used in evaporative cooling on the data canter roofs does later condense as rain somewhere again, but the issue is that it will be far away from the location by then, so that’s no relief for the local water network that is taxed by the demand.
Hahaha, future historians. Rich.
It evaporates in cooling. A closed loop system would avoid this, but it’s more expensive, so we destroy ourselves instead.
That’s insane. I simply assumed they were closed loop systems because it makes sense. When I worked with HVAC systems, that’s all they ever were.
Wow.
Put a straw in your hand.
Get a mouthful of ice cold water
Blow it through the straw out the other side.
Feel it cool your hand? See how its dispersed out to god knows the fuck where? Never returning in any significant volume to replenish the cup it was drawn from
Thats basically whats going on.
Billions of gallons of drinkable water, wasted because data centers didnt want to pay the extra cost for a closed loop cooling system. putting enormous strain on water systems that are already at or beyond their breaking points and are not able to replenish at even a fraction of the rate that they are being drained from.
even closed loop can only recycle the same water so many times
Industrial closed loops rarely use water. and will last a very long time. besides, lets be generous and just assume its running nothing but water water and some anticorosive additives. it will run on that water for a very long time, and changing out that water once a year is still trillions of gallons less than what would be consumed otherwise.
Those AI fruit videos though…
It evaporates. They could cool it back down and reuse it, but that would increase costs even more and corporations like money.
Also, “but it remains part of the water cycle” is irrelevant. Of fucking course it does; we’re not talking about nuclear fusion here! But what matters isn’t how much water exists, it’s how much usable water exists and when it evaporates it stops being usable.
It’s worse than the image describes… This senseless, STUPID waste of water and power drives up costs and also eliminates jobs.
It’s pure downside for everyone but the companies building them.
nah they will be having a field day with all the crazy fascism.
that’s if there’s anyone left after the burger reich.
At this rate the Sahara will become livable again and the US will become a scorching desert, probably not but that water will definitely go somewhere else.
Some of this is that there is only so much to consume at a time. It’s a problem for a while with farms in California and why there is rationing.
A very simplified example.
Say there is a high ground point. All of the rain falls there. It runs down a stream to the ocean, where it eventually evaporates and goes back to the high point where it rains again.
Basic cycle.
Say it rains 1000 gallons per day. Which is probably ridiculously low, but, again, simplified example.
Along the flow to the ocean route, 10 people build farms, each farm needs 100 gallons of water for their crops each day.
So it rains, the water flows, each farmer pulls their 100 gallons, nothing reaches the ocean anymore but it all still evaporates and goes back to the high point where it rains.
If an 11th farmer comes along, now things get broken, because the new 11th farmer also needs 100 gallons, but it only rains 1000 gallons a day. The farmers make it work, maybe they import a bit of water each or they make due with 90 gallons instead of 100.
Now let’s take a new data center. They build right next to the top, and consume 900 gallons of water per day. The 11 farmers downstream, are now turbo fucked, along with the food they produce.
This also does not get into potential contamination, which should be filtered out as it evaporates because the contaminates don’t evaporate, nor does it get into possible misleading claims about how “the data center does not use that much water” while omitting the power generators next door that are technically a third party company that technically are not “part of” the data center, that actually consume the water.
Of course the scale in this analogy is a bit wrong. The farmers would be using 2 orders of magnitude more than the data centers and most of it being for crops to feed to cows, not crops that humans eat. And at the end is a guy trying to get drinking water out of his faucet which isn’t happening due to the farmers and the data centers
The 264 billion gallons absorb enough energy from the data center to evaporate. They turn into a gaseous form and rise into the sky where they become clouds. The clouds will eventually precipitate and turn into rain, but it might take months and months, and it probably won’t happen in dry areas with low rainfall. It might even happen over the ocean, turning the clouds into undrinkable salty seawater.
I’m a bit uneducated on this, so maybe its a dumb question… But couldn’t saltwater be used for cooling as well? We have desalination plants, I’m sure there has gotta be a way to use the water for cooling and eliminate the freshwater problem completely, right? I’m assuming it is just that they don’t want to spend more money?
Salt water is really hard on plumbing. At best it could be used as a secondary cooling loop.
I’m assuming it is just that they don’t want to spend more money?
It’s always this.
Saltwater is corrosive so it would cost more to maintain.
Desalinization is a very costly process, so you would do it only if there are really no other alternatives. If if you can’t get cheaper in other ways
It might even happen over the ocean, turning the clouds into undrinkable salty seawater.
Well, I mean, doesn’t water evaporate from the ocean constantly and then also become rain?
To be clear it’s still a huge problem due to redistribution issues especially in drought stricken areas, but I feel like the ocean is actually like the main source of freshwater precipitation globally, right?
Sure, but we don’t usually use rain for drinking. It first has to pass through the ground and be pumped up.
The problem is that data centers are basically skipping the one step where humans have access to the water.
I think they’re using potable drinking water too. So we pay for it to be treated before data centers use it.
Why.
If you want to have water evaporated, you want it to not contain too much gunk otherwise your “evaporation pot” will get muddy real quick (not defending ai, just giving their rational)
Water has to be balanced before being pumped through the facility, or it will corrode or calcify the piping. DCs use municipal water so they don’t have to cover the cost of balancing themselves.
I don’t think the amount of evaporation from the ocean increases based on how much water is in the ocean at a proportional rate.
Not to mention the oceans cover 2/3 the surface of Earth, so any precipitation only has a 1/3 chance of being on land. And then of course as others have mentioned that doesn’t mean it will rain in an accessible area or where it is most needed.
Probably not, but we’re in luck! As data centers accelerate climate change we’ll get more evaporation as the average ocean temperature continues to climb
You want a hurricane? That’s how you get hurricanes
plus whatever anti-corosives and other [[accumulating] forever[?]] chemicals added that remain
I always assumed that distilled water (water turned to vapour, and re-condensed) is purified in the process.
That depends on how it’s recondensed. For distilled water you need a sterile collector.
The issue is that even when data centers don’t evaporate the water completely, their waste water has a much higher concentration of contaminants (because a bunch of the water evaporated out, concentrating everything that doesn’t evaporate). This makes it undrinkable.
Copying from another thread on this, but the focus on water use over electricity and emissions of datacenters does not make sense. It’s just helping datacenter by focusing on the wrong environmental issue because they are not a major contributor to water use.
Agriculture, and animal agriculture specifically, are the super dominant water users. Even in water scarce places like the Colorado river
Animal agriculture also pollutes ground water, and at a far higher rate and frequency. They create toxic algae blooms are from the runoff which means high nitrate levels in the local water level. Cancer rates are elevated nearby animal farms
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935126006286
Meanwhile electrical usage is delaying fossil fuel plant closure, leading to new ones, leading to backup generator use, etc. Datacenters are projected to go from 5% of electricity use to 15%. I keep seeing 5x the number of posts on the water usage than emissions. It’s letting datacenters get away with their super high emissions with so much less attention to it
Yeah but Agriculture produces stuff we actually need instead of automating people’s jobs and child porn
Though not all agriculture is equal. We don’t need to be eating nearly so much meat, dairy, and so on though. Per capita consumption has gone through the roof in previous decades. If we are concerned about water, we should also be also reducing our consumption. For a number of other reasons too
You are right but I find it quite hard to raise arguments against cattle raising when the animals existing allow for a better outcome than if they didn’t.
An objective example: I’ve recently read a paper on how two landrace breeds, one of sheep and one of cows, are more effective at preventing wild fires than conventional cleaning efforts through the use of machinery to manage vegetation. The animals selectively eat vegetation that is usually source of ignition or facilitates fast spread of fire, reach areas where machines can not go and do not destroy the landscape. Apparently there are good indicators that the grazing may even lead to soil improvement and more biodiversity.
Regardless, there are people trying to remove these animals from the landscape. I don’t agree. Better to have animals roaming around, living their lives, than burning fuel to try and make a poor work at cleaning what otherwise are abandoned tracts of land and then have wild fires destroying everything in they path, often caused by malicious human hand.
The better approach for those cases is to let the wild grazers back into the land. Cattle and other modern farm animals don’t graze like wild life did
Cows and bison differ in all behaviors — including how they stand, move and graze. Cattle spend almost double the time grazing — 45-49 percent — in comparison to bison — who spend just over a quarter of their time doing so (26-28 percent).
[…]
The types of plants bison and cattle prefer to graze on are also remarkably different. Unlike cattle, who prefer to graze steadily on flowering herbs like clover, milkweed and sunflower, free-roaming bison cover a much larger area, grazing on different varieties of grass, such as perennial grasses, but leaving certain areas of the prairie untouched.
https://sentientmedia.org/cattle-ranching-terrible-for-biodiversity/
Moreover in the net, having cattle on those is usually a net negative to the ecosystem
Livestock farmers often claim that their grazing systems “mimic nature”. If so, the mimicry is a crude caricature. A review of evidence from over 100 studies found that when livestock are removed from the land, the abundance and diversity of almost all groups of wild animals increases
There are no wild grazers here. Closest to it are wild boars and a few introduced deers. I’m in Portugal. Old country. We had a large number of landraces, adapted to specific locations, mostly bred for free range grazing and foraging but the commercial breeds nearly wiped them out.
If we assume that’s true, this still leaves the emission side of things which are quite high for cattle. Cattle are some of the heaviest emitters because of how they digest. Are we at least in agreement that the production level and thus consumption level should come down?
We do.
I still remember meat being treated as a speciality dish, not a daily presence. And the animals were allowed to grow slowly. Herds were smaller. The most affordable meats were normally rabbit, chicken and pidgeon, all animals most people raised at home.
Industrial farming is a monstrosity.
https://www.joburgetc.com/news/ai-data-centers-fresh-water-usage-cooling-recycled/
TLDR: They use evaporative cooling, so the clean drinking water is taken from the water supply and distributed to the air. Yes, the rain cycle works and the water isn’t destroyed, but the water molecules are distributed places that are no longer readily available. Drinking water supplies like aquifers, reservoirs, etc. are depleted, but weather patterns do not necessarily replenish them, particularly weather patterns distorted by climate change.
You’re right about the rain and evaporation in general. It’s the rate of evaporation and source of water that is in question.
This is a simple answer and there’s a lot of factors but generally, it’s the rate of usage.
Farms in California are facing drought - the water cycle hasn’t stopped, but the water source in the mountains is drying up as climate change impacts are felt - so they extract groundwater (which is not replaced at the rate of extraction). This groundwater evaporates or leaves inside the vegetables they grow and falls as rain but not where it was extracted from.
A datacentre in Wisconsin pulls water from a Great Lake, is used for cooling, the water evaporates, and rains somewhere else. The Great Lake shrinks. It’s the same effect.
Plus, the water may be treated (contaminated) by the datacentre. It may be using treated drinking water.
Simply: almost all of it precipitates in the world’s oceans, where it is practically useless.
