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How does the US use water?

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Re: How does the US use water?

#111

Post by [deleted] »

FredPret wrote: post #83
hinkley wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

Re: How does the US use water?

#112

Post by LeifCarrotson »

newfocogi wrote: post #8

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…

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.

Re: How does the US use water?

#113

Post by js2 »

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...

Re: How does the US use water?

#114

Post by alright2565 »

arp242 wrote: post #57

> 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…

The average American discards 80lb/year of clothing. That absolutely isn't serving a human need, that's plain overconsumption.

Re: How does the US use water?

#115

Post by kjkjadksj »

adrr wrote: post #19
newfocogi wrote: post #8

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…

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.

Many golf courses in arid regions are on greywater.

Re: How does the US use water?

#116

Post by kjkjadksj »

ryandrake wrote: post #58
jeffbee wrote: post #6

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…

> 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 h…

This is why cities extract hookup fees they are designed to pay for this expansion.

Re: How does the US use water?

#117

Post by jonas21 »

azemetre wrote: post #77
jeffbee wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Re: How does the US use water?

#118

Post by jeffbee »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #116
ryandrake wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 h…

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.

Re: How does the US use water?

#119

Post by RandallBrown »

gonzalohm wrote: post #75
RandallBrown wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: How does the US use water?

#120

Post by ralusek »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #112
newfocogi wrote: post #8

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…

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 drinkabl…

Why should it be progressive if it's not even scarce there? Why are you trying to punish people unnecessarily?
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