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AI uses less water than the public thinks

californiawaterblog.com

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Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#221

Post by ssl-3 »

shimman wrote: post #205
ssl-3 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of us work for and do business with companies that purposefully hide information from the public. That doesn't seem to be an unusual state of affairs at all; it instead seems like a very normal way of doing things.

Oh yeah it's totally normal for neoliberal America to fuck over the public at every opportunity for private corporate gain. Not going to disagree with that at all. But if you think this is honestly a GOOD thing, you have deep anti-human sentiments.

No. That's not what I said, and you're quite clearly being disingenuously hyperbolic.

Let's calm down a bit and bring this back down to earth, shall we?

Suppose you buy your groceries from a company.

Do you have a right to inspect that company's books to evaluate things like their energy use and their water consumption?

Yes? No?

Should you have that right?

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#222

Post by TaupeRanger »

skwirl wrote: post #135
parsimo2010 wrote: post #69

Comparing water usage of AI to agriculture and cities is a little misleading. The cities' water usage is to keep people alive with basically mandatory things, like hygiene, and drinking. Agricultural water usage is required because we have to eat to live. Don't compare something optional to something mandatory. Instead, compare AI water usage to that of optional things in a city, such as car washes and water parks. O…

This is even more misleading. You have to eat to live, but absolutely not all water usage for food is mandatory. If you gave me a budget of how much water I could "use" water every year, and I was close to going over, I could easily pay for my annual AI use just by changing what I eat for lunch on a day or two. I could pay for years of AI use just by forgoing buying a new pair of jeans. The water argument has always…

This is the response to have in mind when confronted with AI-water arguments. It's not about HOW the water is used, it's that, if you're truly concerned about water usage, AI is a non-factor compared to basically everything else you do on a daily basis.

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#223

Post by ShyCodeGardener »

Petersipoi wrote: post #92
parsimo2010 wrote: post #69

Comparing water usage of AI to agriculture and cities is a little misleading. The cities' water usage is to keep people alive with basically mandatory things, like hygiene, and drinking. Agricultural water usage is required because we have to eat to live. Don't compare something optional to something mandatory. Instead, compare AI water usage to that of optional things in a city, such as car washes and water parks. O…

> have to eat to live Oh, so that's why we're growing alfalfa in the middle of deserts, flooding the fields with excess water so we can keep water rights, and then shipping the alfalfa to China. It's so we can eat!

Don't be disingenuous. They already were dividing things out by type of usage, like talking about water park usage vs. the usage of an entire city for all purposes. They are already admitting that "water usage of a city" isn't only about quenching thirst and maintaining hygiene, it's not a stretch to assume that they also realize that they can be water wastage in agriculture as well. They can't split out every instance of wastage that could be eliminated, and it's ridiculous to expect them to.

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#224

Post by JoshTriplett »

da_chicken wrote: post #170
legitster wrote: post #70

> Using the prompt, “How much water is likely to evaporate from data centers in California per year, assuming they are all using mostly evaporative cooling?” several free AI websites provided ranges of estimates, below. These AI also can provide ranges and sources for calculation assumptions. Data centers with closed loop cooling systems are absolutely built all of the time. Total evaporative cooling has the advantag…

Yeah, there are alfalfa fields in central Arizona . Alfalfa basically turns water and sunlight into cellulose about as quickly as plants can. Worse, the owners of those fields are often foreign companies. That means they use tremendous amounts of water in one of the driest regions on earth, in the middle of a multiple decade drought, and the wealth these farms generate disappears overseas.

Part of the issue is not systematically using a pricing structure that charges disproportionately more for usage above high thresholds.

The 101-level "solution" is to just raise the price to account for demand. The problem with that is that it treats all usage the same, whether it's a residence's first gallon or an alfalfa field's last gallon. But the former is something we need to protect.

It makes sense to price water, and electricity, in a fashion where the first X costs a certain amount, and the next X has a higher rate, and above some percentile of usage it has a much higher rate, and at some percentile of usage, customers should be very nearly paying for new required utility infrastructure themselves. That allows using pricing to solve supply problems, without penalizing normal levels of usage.

Some utilities already do this. But if there are actual issues with having enough supply for both datacenters/farms/smelters/etc and residential usage, then they're not doing this well enough, or don't have the pricing correct.

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#225

Post by pj_mukh »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #191
pj_mukh wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an extremely frustrating angle to take because what you're implying is that anytime anyone comes up with any system that takes water they should go in front of a panel of experts (seniors) who get to decide whether their water usage is for an "approvable" purpose. Now I don't like water going to Golf courses either but to me even the intermediate solution is to price water accurately. Barring that, long term…

> anytime anyone comes up with any system that takes water they should go in front of a panel of experts (seniors) who get to decide whether their water usage is for an "approvable" purpose. This is absolutely how things work, the water for farming and industry is cheap by design (at least in the US) so that people will have relatively cheap food and consumer goods. Now you can absolutely try to go change that to a s…

I think that’s fine, having an extremely small group of subsidized industries because of historical reasons are fine.

Going forward, I don’t expect any group of experts appointed by the government to know whether a use case is justified and being right. Chaos theory abounds and the second part of my post applies.

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#226

Post by jimrandomh »

I think people are giving the AI-water-use claims too much credibility. The idea that AI datacenters are heavy water users is trivial to refute, and was trivial to refute when it was first introduced. It should be written about in the same tone as one writes about ridiculous conspiracy theories.

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#227

Post by rick_dalton »

52-6F-62 wrote: post #126
LinXitoW wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food

I think good faith would request that the source used for these kinds of questions is not one of the VC firms at the root of these questions. Doubly so when they use such innocuous and authoritative titling as "Our World in Data" which implies some collectivist, community-based outlook that this website is indeed not. To wit, this page is produced in part by the Global Change Data Lab which is a team of economists, a…

Ourworldindata basically just uses data from published research papers and makes interactive graphs that are easy to understand. They also cite their source in every graph and every article. Trying to paint them as disingenious is pretty baseless, you would have to take it up with the authors of the source data and not owid.

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#228

Post by ShyCodeGardener »

parsimo2010 wrote: post #174
Petersipoi wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> have to eat to live Oh, so that's why we're growing alfalfa in the middle of deserts, flooding the fields with excess water so we can keep water rights, and then shipping the alfalfa to China. It's so we can eat!

If we're shipping the alfalfa to China, I assume that means it's supporting some Chinese person's food source, whether they are directly eating the alfalfa, or some animal is eating it that later becomes food. If someone is flooding a field unproductively just to use up their quota of water, that is a bad thing that should be addressed. But even if you excluded that unproductive usage and compared AI water use to leg…

They are pointing out that some locations are not a good place to grow specific things and that there is a lot of water wastage in doing so. Attempting to grow crops in the desert vs. in a temperate climate probably uses more water for the same amount of crops (unless they are desert plants, I guess). This is what's being pointed out. If I decide to grow tomatoes on the moon and then ship them back to Earth to be consumed, it's fair game for people to point out how much of a waste of resources that is vs. just growing them on Earth.

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#229

Post by legulere »

> Their water use is mostly for cooling needs from the heat produced from their electricity use.

You should also include the water needed to produce the electricity, which is the biggest water user in the US:

> The three largest water-use categories were irrigation (118 Bgal/day), thermoelectric power (133 Bgal/day), and public supply (39 Bgal/day), cumulatively accounting for 90 percent of the national total.

https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-much-water-used-people-united-...

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