Stupid 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.
The CO2 cycle is problematic because of timelines. We are releasing millions of years of CO2 accumulation.
Rain is more of a location problem. The evaporated water returns as rain quickly, but maybe somewhere else, such as over ocean. And the aquifer compresses and loses water retention ability.
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.
But you are talking about drinking water. I would be surprised if they even use that for cooling. But any non human consumption use of water (like agriculture) should happily use that water, shouldn't it?
No, agriculture has fairly strict standards about the quality of the water, they can't use gray water to irrigate. Of course it will still work but depending on where you live the produce may then no longer be fit for human consumption.
You can use it for irrigating your lawn but not for vegetables, especially not if you plan on selling them. But 'light' gray water requires relatively little treatment before you can use it again, however this could still be quite expensive compared to just letting it go. I wonder if they've done any quantitative research on this that's public.
That's very interesting, thanks! I had no idea that legionella risk was a thing for data centers. This article mentions that to avoid the risk most data centers treat the water with disinfectants which are sometimes toxic:
They're really nasty bacteria and once in a system they are hard to get rid of because then you have to heat everything to temperatures that the system normally might never reach.
That's why central heating systems that run 'low' every now and then stoke up to 60 degrees or more on the secondary circuit for tap water.
And data centers are the perfect location, endless 35 to 45 degree water. Cooling towers are the main problem for this, another is aerosols of water that has been sitting in the sun for a while, for instance in a garden hose exposed to the sun.
This is America. Our toilets use _clean potable water_ to flush our shit.
Drinking water from the mains is metered, so it is observable from the business perspective. Life finds a way. Heat exchangers and datacenter plumbing absolutely breed life and put things into the water that were not there when it was pumped in.
Imagine if a datacenter used a shady supplier of pipe that used, say, lead in their alloy. Do you want that datacenter grey water going into crops?
Do you think that water that the water that flows from kitchen sink and water that flushes in the toilet in normal house/apartment come from different pipes in any other place of the world?
The water from the lake isn't drinking water either, it is contaminated with all sort of stuff including dead animals and animals excrements. But it doesn't mean it is not suitable for agriculture.
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.
It’s gray water, and just as how I can’t dump gray water from my RV camper into the river, neither can a data center. After running through a heat exchanger there can be all kinds of crap in that water.
Data centers and power plants can and do return cooling water from a river back to the same river but warmer. What do you think is inside their heat exchangers but metal and water?
What do you think is inside their heat exchangers but metal and water?
It's a bad idea to drink hot water from the tap because of the concentration of metals that accumulate in the water heater. Don't assume that a little metal in your water is perfectly safe. As for agriculture, now the metals can concentrate in your lettuce.
And, as other commenters have pointed out, what else is in there? How about Legionnaires Disease?
How is that different from the metal pipes through which drinking water goes through to reach your kitchen tap, some of which are over 100 years old if you live in the UK? The contact with metal shouldn't be the problem in itself. Legionnaires disease either, the water from the river isn't drinking water to start with and the water out of the datacenter wouldn't be drinking water either.
When you start of with 'a stupid question' and people then give you lots of reasonable answers and you persist with more such questions at some point you cause me to doubt if you were really asking your first question in good faith.
I apologize for not humbly submitting to the first comment on HN. If I gave the impression that you were not the ultimate authority on this topic, I certainly did not intend to do so. I should know better than to oppose common sense on a topic that is way over my head.
I'm definitely not the ultimate authority on this subject or any other but you are either interested and want to know about this or you can keep putting up objections that are masked as questions which seems to be what you are doing.
The main reason we are talking about this is because 'environmentalists' (which in itself gives a hint about the levels of expertise) are worried, they are not worried for no reason. Listing a multitude of reasons should at least make you pause about whether or not they are sincere in their concern.
The degree to which industry would wreck the environment if we let it is by now very well documented. But the EPA has been gutted and lots of safeguards have been abandoned in the name of 'progress'. This is not without risk and I am very happy that in spite of all this a lot of people are still willing to speak up and to make sure that at least the worst excesses are curbed.
You can approach this with curiosity to try to learn about the subject and to try to understand what drives the worry of people that have studied this stuff for a long time. These are not just idle musings. Or you can put up a barrage of questions effectively casting doubt on anything that might be of concern.
The problem with environmentalists is that it is full of militants that aren't engineers and have very strong opinions that don't pass the most cursory smell test.
I am all open to there being problems with re-using water used to cool datacenters (hence my question). But 1) "it boils" defies common sense, no component in a computer should run at >100 degree celcius continuously, so I find it hard to believe that datacentres boil water (and I would have noticed the big cooling tower on the side of them). 2) Legionnaire disease is certainly a big deal in residential buildings with stagnant warm water, sitting in pipes sometimes for days until someone takes a shower. I fail to see how it is a major issue for a continuously flowing industrial application where the water spends very little time at elevated temperature and is continuously flowing before being released into colder water. 3) "contact with metal is bad" certainly doesn't come from someone who has seen the water supply chain in the UK or any European country with ancient infrastructures. Many of which are still made of lead. 4) "water is then not suitable for human consumption", well neither is the water in a lake. All drinking water has been filtered and sterilised. I would be surprised water used for cooling has been treated that way. So unclear to me why there would be any expectation that the water coming out of a datacenter should be any cleaner than the water coming out of a lake.
Now there is common sense, and there are regulations. The two often form a perfectly disjoint venn diagram. So I am happy to believe that there are regulations resulting in absurd situations. But from an actual risk point of view, I don't see how a datacenter "consumes" water, in any comparable way than a swimming pool, agriculture, chemical plants, or gardening, where the water cannot be used for anything else after that. To me it is more akin to a nuclear power plant, which releases water at a slightly higher temperature (despite actually boiling it), and therefore has a fairly limited impact on the water supply.
> it comes out of the datacenter just a little warmer
Exact values matter. Some power plants had been found dumping +10 C water into lakes/rivers, while they had permit only for +5, and it totally destroyed local ecosystem. And most efficient (in terms of money) is evaporation cooling, where at least part of water is "lost".
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.
Not if you compare states with similar levels of economic development, like US states or EU countries.
Iowa, South Dakota, Kansas, Oklahoma have around 50% wind and 10 cent electricity.
When comparing EU states, the correlation is more about who taxes electricity and who builds wind. Comparing pre-tax prices has a very slight downward trend as the country has more wind.
You see a lot of propaganda graphs online that have the EU states clustered in the top right and a cluster of unlabelled Petro states and dictatorships who subsidize electricity in the other quadrant.
The intended implication is that you should emulate the countries they are afraid to name because it would make their graph ridiculous.
To add to the list: on iOS, if your music library is mp3s transfered on the phone with itunes, iOS randomizes the artwork of the mp3s, so a song will show a completely different artwork. Have experienced that for years, on multiple devices and across versions of iOS.
But if that someone isn't rational it is better to not give him the time to react to your highest bid.
Also some sellers seem to use some fake accounts to bid high on their own item, revealing your max bid, then cancel their bid, then bid right under your max bid to maximise their sell price. Happened to me twice, and now no longer setting my max bid in advance since.
It does. You can argue you bid a wrong amount by mistake. It's necessary because mistakes do happen, and it even happened to me to retract a mistake once (was bidding on two items simultaneously in two tabs and mixed them up). But it gets abused.
Auctions are 90% bad deals because you often end up with someone getting over excited and bidding more than the next buy me now price for the same product. But 10% of the time you get lucky, particularly if auctions end at odd time of the day. So I find it's worth throwing some bids, knowing that you should almost always lose. Ebay is best when you are not in a hurry and happy to wait for the right bargain.
> you often end up with someone getting over excited and bidding more than the next buy me now price for the same product.
I don't find auctions exciting or compelling, so I doubt I'd get overly excited about bidding. I'd just set a max bid (probably about half what I would expect to pay with "buy it now", to compensate for the extra delays and hassle involved with auctions) and call it good. If I'm outbid, I'd just do the straight purchase like I would have anyway.
The reason that unnoticed auctions might be worth me looking at is to expand the pool of possible sellers to buy from. Although if my bid makes the auction suddenly attract the attention of automated bidders/snipers, then there's no point to it for me. This might be a nonstarter.
I'll probably give it a try and see how it goes, though.
I mean, an auction is something where you "win" by agreeing to pay more than anyone else. It's always going to be a bad deal for the buyer. The key with Ebay is to actually sell stuff on there too. If you're just a consumer you'll lose out on auctions in the long run.
> It's always going to be a bad deal for the buyer.
That's not true. Sometimes there's not a lot of demand and you pay much less than average market price.
If something is priced super low then someone might step in to arbitrage, but even with perfect knowledge in a perfectly efficient market, an arbitrager will only be willing to pay the true value minus the cost of relisting, the cost of reshipping, the cost of their time, the cost of tying up their money, and the cost of the risk it won't resell. If you beat that by fifty cents you'll get a great deal on the item.
Some items are poorly marketed - in the wrong category, missing a model number, listed as 1MB rather than 1GB, poorly described, poorly photographed etc.
This either limits the number of bidders though worse discoverability or just less desirability and lower prices.
London, increasingly common. I’d say a third of the time when I take the tube. Combine that with people making loud calls, 100% of the time. But I find people imposing their music or tiktok videos more obnoxious than a builder discussing his next job a bit loudly.
I think it will depend on your route and the time of your commute. I see fairly distinct behaviour at different times on the tube & Elizabeth Line: come in or leave late and it's full of people who are much less considerate, go in with the majority and there's a bit more social pressure against being inconsiderate.
I also never see this behaviour, but I pretty much only use the tube for commuting at peak times. I think commuters are generally better behaved. The sheer density of people means that anti social behaviour will get angrily shut down very quickly.
It may also be highly dependent on which direction you travel. When you travel east from the city, you get totally different demographics than when you travel west.
I've not noticed that correlation at all. I just wanted to see who was brave enough to actually speak their racism or whether they'd just suggest it in a cowardly way.
The worst is not calls, it is the thousands of zombies hooked up on tiktok 24/7, of course with headphones, so completely unaware and indifferent to their environment, who block tunnels, escalators, turnstiles, etc.
In the 90s we read the paper and dumbed with our magnetic tickets. In the 00s we listened to MP3s while playing snake on an oyster. In the 10s we played Andy birds and listened to iTunes with a credit card at the turnstile. In the 20s we doom scroll and listen to Spotify while tapping out with our phone.
All of that that they did while they sit. I don’t remember people reading the newspapers while slow walking in the middle of a corridor. And the problem with headphones is that they make people unaware of their surrounding, alone in the world, and therefore for instance unaware that there is someone on their left that they will cut the way to. Small incivilities, but repeat several times a day every day and it gets seriously annoying.
Certainly people would do that. And sending text messages in the 00s. People have been wearing headphones while commuting for a generation, and (not on the underground but certainly on trains) people in the 80s and 90s were far more obnoxious - get stuck on a busy train between people having conversations about inane stuff while smoking.
Public transport is far better today than it was 30 years ago, annoyances are far less than they were.
The only benefit was the ability to jump on and off away from bus stops. If you had any kind of mobility issue they were awful, and even if you didn’t they were still far more camped than a modern bus.
Russia I presume is on the list because of geopolitical tensions.
I am not familiar with every country in that list but in my experience, what looks like an anomaly is Morocco, which produces a fairly large elite compared to the size of the country (worked with lots of highly educated / highly paid (and therefore net tax contributing) moroccan nationals). I have hardly worked with any other nationality in that list in my professional life (Bangladesh and Tunisia maybe).
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