Comment on A.I. tools fueled a 34% spike in Microsoft’s water consumption, and one city with its data centers is concerned about the effect on residential supply

Zarxrax@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

• chaorace@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  In theory, yes. Of course, the same holds true for a lot of things which we currently use clean water for! The water needs of agriculture, toilets, carwashes, and many more could be addressed through so-called graywater (e.g.: pumped lakewater, rooftop rainwater) if we really sat down and wanted to make it happen.

  The reason that we don’t do these things is rather mundane: it’s cheaper and easier to tap into the shared drinking water infrastructure than it is to collect your own water and roll your own silos/filtration tech. That might change as the world changes – something has to give eventually if we use more groundwater than we replenish, but much like clean drinking water, I don’t think it’s a problem we should ask individual entities to solve. Governments would generally be much more suited to efficiently collecting drainwater, scrubbing it, distributing it, and mandating usage in wasteful commercial applications.

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  • hoodatninja@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    A lot of problems we don’t solve boil down to “it’s boring and expensive” lol it’s sad when you think about it

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  • LetMeEatCake@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I wonder what the practical implementation would be here. I assume current water infrastructure is two sets of pipes, one for clean water and one for wastewater. Would the solution here be to add a third parallel set of pipes for greywater?

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    • flipht@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      It probably doesn't make sense to do infrastructure -wide duplication for a greywater system. That would be a lot of pipe and possible leaks in places where that resource isn't needed.

      Smaller loops make more sense for specific needs like this. It just needs to be legislated - over a certain size, you need to pump, filter if required for your application, and then dump in accordance with whatever rules we set. If local governments want, they can subsidize this through tax breaks - we already have robust systems for giving corporations money back, we just need to tie it to the types of performance we need to see, whether that be environmental improvements, job creation/retention, etc.

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• bladerunnerspider@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Dirty water is bad for cooling equipment

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  • Zarxrax@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Well, building on that question, why do they need a constant supply of clean water? My desktop PC has a water cooler, and it just recirculates the same water.

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    • givesomefucks@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Because that’s expensive to build on this scale. They’d have to cool the water back down again.

      It’s cheaper to just run cold tapwater in at a fast rate, and dump the hot water intothe sewer.

      Which is why we need laws that go after industries that use insane amounts of water, if we don’t it causes shortages and everyone’s rate to go up

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      • Nougat@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        It’s cheaper to just run cold tapwater in at a fast rate, and dump the hot water into the sewer.

        There should be a cost to corporations using municipal water supplies for purposes unrelated to direct consumption for drinking, cooking, washing, toilets. You shouldn't be able to use it for cooling only, and you shouldn't be able to bottle and resell it.

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    • netburnr@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Sounds like they are using evaporation cooling towers for the air chillers.

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    • kitonthenet@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      It’s evaporative cooling, big cooling towers

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  • kalleboo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Power plants use lake water directly for cooling - they use a heat exchanger

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  • GigglyBobble@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Do it like a power plant with a closed on a disconnected open loop. It's not exactly a new problem.

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• bhmnscmm@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  The water isn’t being consumed. It’s going through the same process all the water in the city is going through.

  Pulled from the river, cleaned, used for cooling at the data centers, and returned to the river via the waste water system.

  The only loss is the energy/resources to treat the water.

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