what an incredible slop political cartoon around the first paragraph
AI uses less water than the public thinks
311–320 of 425 posts
Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks
#312I would not extrapolate California results to the rest of the country. Other regions like Northern Virginia or Dallas-Forth Worth dominate current and future data center load. They have significantly different water and land use trends. Of course agricultural water usage is higher in California- it's the top agricultural state in the country. And energy prices are much higher, resulting in a smaller data center presence. State regulations also determine water usage efficiency requirements. So it might differ in less regulated states like Texas.
Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks
#313Cool. Except. Water vapor is a potent greenhouse gas.
Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks
#314> 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.
> are often foreign companies
That have _themselves_ banned Alfalfa farming; because, of the water impact.
Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks
#315Did anyone find it weird that the author uses AI itself to perform the calculations? Seems like a very poor quality piece
> Alas, despite modern technologies and institutions, our human societies, technology, and understanding ultimately rely on 50,000-year old hardware (our brains!), which evolves slowly and mysteriously. Unavoidably, we work with individual and collective neural hardware limits.
this bit especially tells me the reader needs a pile of salt.
Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
Until people/animals eat it, or it decomposes. Not saying this like we should ignore the co2 impact from data centers, but biomass is a pretty poor co2 absorber unless its cyano and falls to the ocean floor before decomposing
> Until people/animals eat it, or it decomposes. Well, if you want to think about it that way (perfectly reasonable), you'd also want to consider the production of new alfalfa. Figure that at any given time, the world contains X amount of alfalfa, and that amount determines how much carbon is absorbed by the alfalfa industry.
I'm not sure any carbon is absorbed even by this metric. Unless were growing alfalfa and sequestering it below ground.
You should probably also consider inputs to growing that alfalfa too. Even single order inputs like transportation, fertilizer, water, etc would likely have more carbon release than the carbon mass of the alfalfa.
Is alfalfa even one of the plants that will nitrogen fix from the air? Or is it all pulled from the growing medium?
Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wa…
I disagree. A large part of the cost of a utility is fixed per customer. Or any product really. That's how bulk purchasing makes sense. I can get 4x the product at a bulk store for 2x the price. Instead of being prejudicial about the use case, let's just charge what the utility actually costs. Include capital, operation, and decommissioning costs. That way, if you get a sudden spike in demand, you have the cash flow to issue a bond a scale up.
Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks
#318Earlier 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…
let's have the tool we created as a society called "the government" regulate it instead of waiting for "the market" to price things accurately. Because let's be real golf courses will pay higher prices and poor people will suffer the burden if we wait for your idea to magically happen
It's better to have everyone pay the fair market price. Price isn't arbitrary, it reflects the real cost to produce the good. It encourages efficient use. If you feel one usage is more worthwhile, you can subsidize it.
Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks
#319This is a bit of a dead horse, but the magnitude of how off the public is on this continues to amaze me. Pete Buttigieg did a Tulsa town hall a week or so ago where someone cited it taking "10,000 gallons of water just to generate one photo".[0] [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCc-ipWVShY&t=1h5m43s
Honestly, it's weird to me how fixated both sides are on water. People against data centers overestimate water usage, but people who think we should build as many as we can, as fast as we can seem the think that "actually they don't use that much water" somehow negates the more real issues with them.
Because it is an easy concrete way to stir up reactionary sentiment. The real issues are debatable but complex. But the common folk can all visualize a gallon of water.
Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wa…
This causes major market distortions and worse outcomes than the econ 101 solution.
The problem is that water isn't traded on a normal market at all. Lots of people have historical water rights and pay nearly nothing for their water use. There's byzantine regulation and many have the right to use for some purpose on their land but not to resell, so the market cannot allocate to more efficient use.
If you just let the 101 level solution actually work, water prices will rise until inefficient uses like water-intensive agriculture (not even all crops!) are pushed out. Urban users easily outbid almost all agricultural use, even at what any person would consider dirt cheap prices. For example, desalinated water, which is considered expensive for agriculture, can be 40 cents per cubic meter of water. That's a lot of water! Usually the last mile of urban water delivery costs more than that.
The amount required to satisfy all urban use, including water hungry lawns etc, and datacenters, corresponds to a very minor reduction in agriculture. Perhaps even just changing which crop is grown or switching irrigation techniques.
Charging more to higher users, price discrimination, causes several problems. First, it creates an incentive to cheat. I'm not using all this water myself, its for this whole group of people who "live" here. Don't allow this kind of spreading (somehow...)? Now you actually screw any business or institution that serves a lot of people. A farm produces food for thousands- do they count as one user? A park uses much more water than a garden but serves many more people. Whatever framework you create will require another bureaucracy to run. Lobbyists will find or insert loopholes for their friends.
The heavy users actually improve the system robustness, in both electricity and water. Their higher demand pays for more supply infrastructure, which itself often benefits from economies of scale, and in a shortage they may even be more responsive to price increases due to their high use.