Pretty much every power plant heats water to steam, then uses steam turbines to generate power. This is also how nuclear submarines and arcraft carriers work. We never left the steampunk era.
We're leaving it now, the majority of new energy capacity is now solar, and not steam based (>70% in 2024). And a non-trivial chunk of the remainder is wind (also not steam based).
And in the US of the part that's still fossil based, new capacity is combustion turbine based, which at most gets a minority share of its power from a steam bottoming cycle.
What they are calling “per capita domestic water use” is the per capita public+self supplied, which is not the same as home use. They sort of hand-wave over “most of this is used at home” but really it is inclusive of not only lawns (which are bigger in the US) but commercial use of water as well- commercial landscaping (far more in the US than in Europe) and other business use Plumbing fixtures are also more regulat…
As with most things, I think there's multiple things. US home also tend to be larger, meaning the hot water line is longer from the tank to the shower. Most americans I know tend to leve the shower running before they get in so it "warms up". I've never been in a European shower that's required that.
Not just the bigger homes, from what I can tell in US home construction the length of the hot water pipe isn't a consideration at all, while it is a common consideration in European homes. In Europe (vast overgeneralization incoming) it's not unusual to have a boiler or a tankless water heater directly in the bathroom to keep the line short, and then have the kitchen close by. Having multiple water heaters per home is also completely normal and a common solution if the kitchen is too far from the bathroom or multiple bathrooms are far from each other. In the US the norm seems to be to just stick a big boiler in the basement or somewhere else out of the way, then run hot water lines everywhere. Maybe in part due to the added effort of running 220V lines in a 110V country
> 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…
Seems to me we need a better pricing system for water so the market can sort out if the application is valuable enough.
One thing that shocks me as an immigrant from Europe to the US is toilets. I have not seen a single one that has the two buttons, one for pee and one for the other stuff. Every time I use the toilet it uses 1.6 gallons. 6 liters... I think in my home country more than 90% of home toilets are the "low water usage one" (with 3 and 6 liters buttons) And that's only the start, I noticed that people just don't care about…
Say every single one of the 330 million people in America flushes a toilet five times a day, every day of the year. That’s still less than a cubic mile of water. Lake Mead, by comparison, has a volume of 7 cubic miles. Every American could go back to using outhouses and the water savings wouldn’t even be noticeable. People are not very good at visualizing this stuff. The volumes involved are hard to grasp. Or think o…
For what it's worth there are other considerations like wastewater processing capacity, especially when it rains
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…
a datacenter getting "priority" over potable water to feed the data farms instead of, say, requiring "humans first, datacenter if there's any left"
Can anybody explain why water used by data centers is considered as disappeared/consumed? Isnt it possible to reuse it for irrigation?
TFA says:
> Per Lawrence Berkeley Lab[1], in 2023, data centers used around 48 million gallons of water a day directly for cooling. Most of this water will evaporate as part of the cooling process[2], and is thus consumed.
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…
Every degree of global warming raises the amount of water the air can hold by 7%. That's what's going on in California recently. We only need to put our finger on the scale to really fuck things up. We don't have to stand on it. Also heat island effect. We don't have to move the needle in Yosemite to make downtown LA into a death trap. What's your tidy "Me worry?" explanation for aquifer depletion?
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.
Yep, 1.6 trillion gallons of water from the Colorado river goes into irrigation for alfalfa[1]. Google's total water consumption across all data centers in 2023 was 6.4 billion gallons[2]. People are sounding the alarm about water usage in AI data centers while ignoring the real unsustainable industries like animal agriculture. 1: https://coloradosun.com/2024/04/04/research-colorado-river-w... 2: https://www.datacent…
Water is not evenly distributed.aData centers are not bieng located where there is excess water, they are bieng located in areas where they have access to the critical infrastucture they need,and the use of domestic potable water supplys to cool there operations is done as it reduces there land
and infrastructure requirements, is quick, and they care nothing about the costs of electricity and water, while they drive up costs for the people who live in the surounding areas.
People NEED water, data does not.
People NEED agriculture, they do not NEED data.
conflating the water uses of things to people is false.
> 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.
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.
Is this the norm for most places in the US?
Where I live our water/sewer bill averages out to a little over $100 a month.