Environmentalists worry Google behind bid to control Oregon town's water
sfgate.comStupid question: datacenters need water for cooling right? But they don't boil that water, ie it comes out of the datacenter just a little warmer? If that is the case does it matter to the city? The warmer water can still be used for agriculture or any other common usage.
There are multiple ways. Closed loops, well not big deal you fill up and there is slight evaporation losses, but you could ship that in in tanker truck maybe once every few years.
Next is open loop cooling using secondary loop. Take a river, lake or sea. Pump some water from it, pass through heat exchanger and pump back out. Manageable for most of the year. Worse version is pump ground water and return it to these. Depletes the ground water...
And finally evaporative cooling. Which is boiling, but not at boiling point. Water goes to sky. No immediate return to local ground water or downstream the river... In this case you actually do in sense use up the water. Kinda like burning fossil fuels returns co2 to atmosphere. It will later turn to biomass, but that is a separate cycle.
A lot of it gets converted to water vapor in the evaporative coolers, so it doesn't flow out -- it becomes humidity or clouds. The coolers do also produce waste water, but with all the minerals left behind after evaporation it's not suitable for drinking.
It's not a stupid question but: technically, after passing through Google's facility that is now gray water, and you can't use that for agriculture or any other 'common usage' without a whole raft of work and you can't just dump it into the aquifer either.
But if it just went through some heat exchangers, it's not like if it was dirty? As far as I know, nuclear power plants return the water they consume to the rivers they extracted it from.
Heat exchangers could easily contaminate the water. If they're not kept hot enough they could be breeding ground for Legionella and a whole raft of other bacteria. Clean water is science, not just a matter of bulk pumping stuff from one place to another (though that's definitely a part of it). Water treatment plants are complex and have a ton of QA on their product. You can't just run it into a factory and pretend it is the same stuff going in modulo some increase in temperature.
Don't they reuse the water by cooling it outside the data center? Most power plants do that.
Yes, but that does not mean it is now clean water. Anything could happen between the moment Google ingests it and spits it back out, the assumption that it is 'just' a little warmer is nice but it misses the option of for instance contamination from a secondary circuit or various substances leaching into the water used as a coolant.
I know google fiber kinda flumped, but if they are already doing their own power generation for data centers they might decide to sell that power to the public too. What is really scary is that I foresee a day where these big tech companies will see it is more profitable to serve utilities to people than web services. Then, after they have a monopoly in most areas, they will enshitify it too.
I don't think that will happen. Being utility is hard and margins are not great unless you get some government money like credit. And even those might go away with change in regime.
There just isn't enough margin or "free money" for someone like Google.
At this point, Google could be a drop-in replacement for the corporate villain in any 1980s/1990s action movie.
Cue the White Knights defending the poor misunderstood megacorp from their keyboards.
80s and 90s films had better villains.
Has google even had a preserved fetal pig delivered to anyone?
Why on earth do they want water from the national forest when the massive Columbia River is right there!? Is it too expensive to treat the river water? /s
At this moment I just assume by default that those “watchdogs”, “environmentalists”, “nonprofits” are mix of nimby-ists and/or thinly veiled attempts of extracting money
(it’s a nice things you got here. It would be a shame if some rare species of a frog would be found here. A small donation for the great cause/good, of course, would help us to work on ensuring that nobody gets in harms way).
Do you still work for Google?
This comment made me curious is such a thing actually happens.
As it turns out "greenmailing" is a thing, but not from environmental groups. Here's what claude found for me:
<ai> The concern isn't baseless—there are documented cases of parties using environmental law as leverage, particularly California's CEQA. But empirical studies show only ~13% of such lawsuits actually come from environmental groups; the majority come from labor unions, business competitors, and NIMBYs hijacking environmental review for unrelated purposes. In this specific case, WaterWatch has a 40-year track record on Oregon water issues and the concerns about fish habitat are supported by the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs—so the 'thinly veiled shakedown' framing doesn't really fit </ai>
I hope doing that research didn't spend too much water!
>I just assume by default
Gitmo couldn't get me to admit to this degree of intellectual cowardice
Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.
Based on your original comment it would seem that this is aimed at yourself?