- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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A small data center has been estimated to use upwards of 25 million liters of water per year if it relies on old-school cooling methods that allow water to evaporate.
So pass a law banning evaporative cooling systems from all industrial and commercial applications (or single out data centers), give them 6 months to comply and start handing out fines every day past the deadline.
straight up not feasible for many serious and necessary facilities like powerplants and refineries, unless you prefer very warm lake or river nearby (which also cools down by evaporation later)
straight up not feasible
It’s very feasible to create the law, collect the fine, and raise the price on energy sources or industrial process that require the cooling.
It’s a formality, you could do it in an afternoon. Costs a bit of ink and a piece of paper.
“But then it gets more expensive!” and “This might push corporations out of the city/country.” is the consequence the people / the government / the country have to have the balls to endure, if they want to stand by things like “having enough water” or “living on earth in the 22nd century”.
If the free market is something you believe in, you should love this, because it makes water a more scarce resource and the market will be able to find another optimal solution to that new scarcity problem.
Show me how do you want to dissipate 10GWt inland without evaporative cooling towers, i’ll wait
summitsystems.co.uk/adiabatic-coolers-vs-cooling-towers/
There are many solutions to this problem. Evaporative cooling is just the cheapest. But it’s only cheap because we don’t charge these water users market rates for water. If they’re threatening drinking water or agricultural water we should just charge them for water usage the same as you pay for drinking water at home. That’s fundamentally what they’re taking when they drain the rivers dry. That way they compete directly on the water market instead of bypassing it.
They’ll install adiabatic coolers in no time.
If evaporative cooling is the only solution then the market will adjust to the new cost by moving power generation towards the coasts or just increase the price, if there are other solutions they’ll become the economically more viable. Either way more water is conserved and you can always balance the cost benefit by adjusting the fine/tax to find a good balance.
The country is riddled with leaky mains pipes because water companies are more concerned with allocating huge bonuses to themselves than they are with fixing infrastructure.
Now we’re courting tech companies to build more data centres that our other shitty infrastructure (electric) isn’t even fit to support because magic money tree go brrrrrrr
This is mandated recycling 2.0. Fill supermarkets with products 99% of which come in plastic wrappers, only successfully recover a fraction of that, and then tell the consumer they’re the ones destroying the environment.
If they can fit my 5 recycling boxes up their rear, then they can shove this up their arse too.
I tried deleting my files but I was age checked…
This is analogous to the “I’m using paper straws while the billionaires take a private jet each to Venice” situation.
So I should delete old mails so that maybe (and actually no, it won’t) there will be less drives to cool in the datacentre while the techbros have entire datacentres using hundreds of terawatts of power[1] and is predicted to be using billions of cubic metres of water per year by 2027[2].
As usual, they’re looking toward the people they can influence to make changes to their lifestyle, and ignoring the people actually doing the damage because they know they will not change.
[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-2024: IEA annual report showing that AI and crypto is estimated to have consumed 465tw/h of energy in 2024. [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/cindygordon/2024/02/25/ai-is-accelerating-the-loss-of-our-scarcest-natural-resource-water: Forbes report stating that AI datacentres are estimated to use around 6.6 billion cubic metres of water by the year 2027.
You alone are nothing, but everyone else like you adds up. Private airplanes of the billionaires in total to less fuel than commercial airplanes. Not that billionaires shouldn’t reduce their consumption, but the “common man” even though insignificant alone still adds up to a lot.
Private airplanes of the billionaires in total to less fuel than commercial airplanes.
Ah yes, planes used by 1% of the population isn’t equal to thr planes used by 99% of the population. What a great comparison!
I suggest spitting to lose weight
Nice analogy. I used this one in the past: “you can’t fix a full disk by deleting word documents”, but I like yours more
I’m not sure how is this applicable?
If you have storage for documents, they will fill it up and you have to remove them.
One shitpost meme video in your downloads folder = hundreds of Word docx files. Pick the low hanging fruit.
So where does this water go after evaporating or leaking from your toilet? Is it flying into deep space and being lost for our planet forever?
Raining over the ocean where it is no longer in the stores of freshwater these systems are pulling from
So this doesn’t sound like a big deal after all. Maybe just stop pulling water from those “stores of freshwater” for cooling purposes and get your own from the ocean.
Corrosion issues, marine life clogging, too expensive, etcetc.
Yeah, let them figure it out. It’s their problem after all. If it’s more expensive, then let them increase prices for their “data serving” activities. If it’s too expensive for some people, they might reconsider their usage of said services which in turn might be equivalent of “deleting old files or emails”. Instead of asking people deleting files right now before those in charge even tried to fix the problems they created.
Ideally yes, but realistically, fuck the commoners, give money.
How is deleting locally-stored files on your home PC going to save water, when your hardware sips resources vs. any AI datacenter in existence?
Most people save these thing in some sort of cloud storage solution.
No, most people do not store their files in a cloud storage solution.
Yeah they do, it has absolutely become the norm and has been for several years. It may not be the norm among Lemmy users, but general public absolutely do use cloud storage for especially pictures.
