But here’s a key piece both sides miss. Not all water is the same. Agriculture often uses untreated irrigation water, think alfalfa fields or golf courses. Data centers, by contrast, need potable water or reclaimed water, either way requiring treatment and distribution through infrastructure designed for that purpose.
On the face of it though it doesn’t look like it should be necessary to use potable water for data centers; it’s just cooling. I expect they use it because it being cleaner means less problems with dirty pipes etc, but isn’t that something that can be addressed? If the costs of potable water to them were hiked up enough it would create an incentive to take cheaper forms of agricultural water and purify it until it’s good enough.
Yes correct. Potable water is used because it is “cleaner”. Also, it is more likely that potable water systems are what are available to connect to. There is no technical reason why we have to use potable water and evaporative cooling. It’s a financial and logistical decision. The market would solve for this if it were a free market, but you know how that goes. As I note governments are mismatched against the resources of the tech companies. Thats not to say the companies are bad, but we need to be open eyed about the current ability to build new systems and price resources.
On the face of it though it doesn’t look like it should be necessary to use potable water for data centers; it’s just cooling. I expect they use it because it being cleaner means less problems with dirty pipes etc, but isn’t that something that can be addressed? If the costs of potable water to them were hiked up enough it would create an incentive to take cheaper forms of agricultural water and purify it until it’s good enough.
Yes correct. Potable water is used because it is “cleaner”. Also, it is more likely that potable water systems are what are available to connect to. There is no technical reason why we have to use potable water and evaporative cooling. It’s a financial and logistical decision.
The market would solve for this if it were a free market, but you know how that goes. As I note governments are mismatched against the resources of the tech companies. Thats not to say the companies are bad, but we need to be open eyed about the current ability to build new systems and price resources.