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How does the US use water?

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Re: How does the US use water?

#51

Post by lillecarl »

gonzalohm wrote: post #28
lxe wrote: post #13

> Average per-capita domestic water use in the US is 82 gallons per day. By comparison, German homes use around 33 gallons per person per day, UK homes use around 37 gallons, and French homes use around 39 gallons. I want to know way more information about these figures... like, are there significant outliers? Drastically different usage profiles?

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…

EU put forwards some Eco labeling thing in 2013 to encourage toilet manufacturers to get eco certified and people buy the stuff (though it was already common long before 2013)

Regulation can be for the greater good, and in this case it's not even mandatory.

I feel like there's a cultural difference where wastefulness is frowned upon at home but encouraged in the US. Big cars, big trucks(cars), big trucks(lorries), big (green)lawns, big roads, big houses, big servings, drive everywhere, fly everywhere, no trains, no public transport.

Everything is big except infrastructure unrelated to cars. Except for some cool dams built before something shifted.

And as others mentioned, the "water rights" which can be traded(bought up) by some evil megacorp instead of benefiting local farmers and population becaue ownership trumps everything.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/ALL/?uri=CELEX:32...

Re: How does the US use water?

#52

Post by blackguardx »

jackconsidine wrote: post #5

> The closest thing the federal government has to a department of water infrastructure, the Bureau of Reclamation, has an annual budget of just $1.1 billion. One of my favorite books is Cadillac Desert . It's about the damming of the US rivers, the water crisis, and the history of the Bureau. It may be dwarfed by the other departments, but its had a massive impact on US population development especially in LA. > From…

For many years, they piped the entirety of the Owens River to LA, over a hundred miles away and over a mountain range. It is wild that the follies of Los Angeles water management has led to permanent scars in the east side of California from Mono Lake to the Salton Sea disaster.

Re: How does the US use water?

#53

Post by cornstalks »

FredPret wrote: post #50
adrr wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> How much water is wasted on golf courses... Zero. You can't waste water, it goes in a cycle. I mean unless you transport it off-planet. You can waste the energy you spent cleaning it and pumping it around. But between nuclear and solar we ought to have an overabundance of that. In a market economy, if it becomes "economically infeasible" to purify used water, the price goes up slightly, and suddenly it makes a lot…

> Zero. You can't waste water, it goes in a cycle.

You can waste water because not all water sources are equally renewable. Some underground aquifers recharge slower than we extract from them.

Re: How does the US use water?

#54

Post by dpc050505 »

FredPret wrote: post #50
adrr wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> How much water is wasted on golf courses... Zero. You can't waste water, it goes in a cycle. I mean unless you transport it off-planet. You can waste the energy you spent cleaning it and pumping it around. But between nuclear and solar we ought to have an overabundance of that. In a market economy, if it becomes "economically infeasible" to purify used water, the price goes up slightly, and suddenly it makes a lot…

Fresh water in a reservoir above a water treatment plant is not the same as salt water in the ocean even if it's the same molecule in the same cycle.

Re: How does the US use water?

#55

Post by grafmax »

Aurornis wrote: post #27
azemetre wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government in The Dalles, Oregon were suing local newspapers that were questioning Google's water usage in the city: https://www.rcfp.org/dalles-google-oregonian-settlement/ Apparently Google uses nearly 30% of the city's water supply: https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2022/12/googles-wa... I highly doubt any apartment block comes close to taking 30% of a city's water supply.

I’ve driven through The Dalles. It’s a very small town. A search shows a population of 15,000 and declining annually. It’s also right on a big river. The article you linked said that Google was spending nearly $30 million to improve the city’s water infrastructure so there are no problems. Talking about this in terms of percentages of a small town’s water supply while ignoring the fact that the city is literally on a…

2/3rds of new data centers are built in areas of existing water scarcity.

Re: How does the US use water?

#56

Post by eweise »

"The US has around 16,000 golf courses, and collectively they use about a billion gallons of water a day, or around 0.3% of total US water use."

I say that's a darn good use of water. Fore!

Re: How does the US use water?

#57

Post by arp242 »

> 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 its AI model. A gallon of water used to cool a data center is creating thousands of times more value than if that gallon were used to water a cotton plant.

Clothing is a basic human need, whereas data centres or AI are, well, not.

To reduce this to purely "economical value" is bizarre. This is "only madmen and economists believe in infinite growth" type stuff.

As for the rest, one of the concerns is that it adds demand to an already stressed system that struggle to meet the other needs – many of which are far more critical – especially during droughts. The proverbial straw that overflowed the bucket, so to speak. Stuff like "it's 6% of the water used by US golf courses" is far too broad because in some areas there are no water shortage problems and in others there are.

Re: How does the US use water?

#58

Post by ryandrake »

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 homes and want to build a multi-story apartment building on it, you need bigger, stronger water supply infrastructure to support all those new sinks. You need bigger, stronger sewage infrastructure to support all the new drains and toilets. Not to mention better electrical infra, different garbage disposal infra, and so on. While I'm generally supportive of "moar housing" you can't just plop the housing down and say job done. You need more of everything else peripheral to and supporting that housing.

Re: How does the US use water?

#59

Post by rawgabbit »

gpm wrote: post #12
rawgabbit wrote: post #11

It said 41% of the water used in the US is for thermo electric cooling. Albeit, it didn't break this down into saltwater vs freshwater. It also said the vast majority of this water usage is due to older plants that did not recirculate the water. The newer plants that recirculate the water only used a tiny fraction of water in comparison. So...if the US replaces all of its old nuclear power plants, we would free up al…

How did you go from "thermoelectric" to "nuclear"? The US has nearly as much coal power as nuclear power, and significantly more natural gas than nuclear.

I assumed only nuclear power plants need that much water for cooling. It is only an assumption. If I am wrong I am happy to be corrected.

Re: How does the US use water?

#60

Post by murderfs »

tzs wrote: post #43
recallingmemory wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are overlooking location. The ideal place to grow crops is a place with great soil, good weather, a long growing season, and abundant water, but there aren't a lot of those. Of those four things, water is the only one that can be reasonably transported. Data centers have fewer constraints. It should be possible to place more or all of them in places where water is abundant.

You are overlooking location. The ideal place to place a datacenter is a place with cheap land, cheap electricity, good backbone connectivity, and close to users, but there aren't a lot of those.
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