
Google gets OK to siphon water for South Carolina plant - Jerry2
https://www.thestate.com/news/local/environment/article235973882.html
======
swebs
>...granted Google permission Wednesday to pump 549 million gallons of water
out of the ground each year to cool servers at its sprawling plant in Berkeley
County.

>DHEC’s decision is the latest development in a bitter fight over whether the
company should get state approval to withdraw from a major groundwater source
that, critics say, is dwindling and in jeopardy of being further depleted.

Just put the warmed water back? It's not like it's being contaminated or
anything.

~~~
londons_explore
This water will be used in evaporative coolers. There won't be warmed water to
return.

The water gets recycled 50-100 times, and each time a small percentage
evaporates into a cloud.

The cloud really does make clouds.

~~~
piker
Evaporative coolers in low country South Carolina? Is there a more humid place
on Earth?

~~~
cptskippy
There won't be as soon as this plant becomes operational.

~~~
auiya
> as soon as this plant becomes operational

It's been operational for 10+ years.
[https://goo.gl/maps/XLEegK3rH1AqUXpw8](https://goo.gl/maps/XLEegK3rH1AqUXpw8)

------
nullc
On one hand, at an industrial scale that isn't _that_ much water: e.g. my
local utility that serves 20,535 customer locations across 75 square miles
provides about 2.2 billion gallons of water per year.

On the other hand, it's a fair amount of water for cooling... wag numbers
ignoring the environmental conditions of their location (and water hardness)
would have me guessing their load would be on the order 100 - 300 megawatts to
need that much make-up water. Could be off by an order of magnitude, but
clearly it's a lot of heat regardless.

------
engineer_22
I'm a water resources engineer. In my experience, this is approximately enough
water to supply 15,000 people on an average daily basis.

~~~
driverdan
Are you saying the average person uses 36,600 gal per year? That seems very
high.

~~~
corodra
549mil gallons allowed to use in a year divided by 365 days equals 1,504,109
daily average for google (let's round to 1.5mil).

USGS estimates 80-100 gallons per American per day.

1,500,000 google's daily average water use / 100 gallons per American per day
= 15,000

Google will use roughly the equivalent of 15,000 Americans worth of daily
water.

Further math:

100 gallons per American per day x 365 days = 36,500 per person per year.

Edit: Had a before coffee typo and added some more math

~~~
jmknoll
Does that number include the water cost of the food we eat? Or is it only
direct personal usage?

~~~
corodra
"Estimates vary, but, on average, each person uses about 80-100 gallons of
water per day, for indoor home uses."

[https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/water-science-
school/scie...](https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/water-science-
school/science/water-qa-how-much-water-do-i-use-home-each-day?qt-
science_center_objects=0#qt-science_center_objects)

------
xyzzyz
If this was a rubber gasket plant in South Carolina getting a water permit, it
would never have hit the news.

~~~
gotAnyEvidence
Do you have any evidence for this claim? Does comparing two separate things
automatically make them equivalent?

On the flip side, when Foxconn wanted 7 million gallons of water each day from
Lake Michigan for it's manufacturing plant, it hit the news.

\- [https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-foxconn-
air-p...](https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-foxconn-air-
pollution-20180129-story.html)

~~~
xyzzyz
How many news about getting water permit you heard last month? How many water
permits are issued daily in the country?

~~~
gotAnyEvidence
So, it's safe to assume that you have no evidence?

The article itself links to another article they wrote on the usage of
groundwater from mega farms. I don't know the answers to your questions
because I don't track those things. I do have the ability to search Google and
prove your initial claim wrong (before you moved the goalposts).

\- Here's an article from 4 days ago about an unrelated project [1]

\- And one from 3 days ago on a different project [2]

\- Here's a different article from today about another project[3]

\- One from last week in a different state [4]

[1] [http://www.chroniclenewspaper.com/news/local-news/county-
att...](http://www.chroniclenewspaper.com/news/local-news/county-attorney-
says-greens-of-chester-has-water-permit-BB560120)

[2] [https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/401-water-quality-
certific...](https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/401-water-quality-
certification-26357/)

[3] [https://www.enr.com/blogs/12-california-
views/post/47743-cal...](https://www.enr.com/blogs/12-california-
views/post/47743-california-supreme-court-rejects-environmental-challenges-to-
monterey-water-project)

[4] [https://www.duncanbanner.com/oklahoma/news/gravel-mining-
per...](https://www.duncanbanner.com/oklahoma/news/gravel-mining-permit-
application-prompts-concerns/article_60a243b5-4fa4-544c-95cc-
efa981b36759.html)

------
Merrill
>In addition to Google’s request in the Charleston area, mega farms in central
South Carolina have been under scrutiny over the amount of groundwater they
use to irrigate crops each summer.

549 million gallons is about 1685 acre feet, which isn't very much irrigation
water. South Carolina golf courses alone use 9.7 million gallons/day of
groundwater for irrigation or 3,540 million gallons per year. SC golf courses
use a combined total of groundwater and surface water of 14,991 millon gallons
per year.

[https://waterdata.usgs.gov/sc/nwis/water_use?format=html_tab...](https://waterdata.usgs.gov/sc/nwis/water_use?format=html_table&rdb_compression=file&wu_area=State+Total&wu_year=2015&wu_category=IG&wu_category_nms=Irrigation%252C%2BGolf%2BCourses)

~~~
galkk
> South Carolina golf courses alone use 9.7 million gallons/day of groundwater
> for irrigation or 3,540 million gallons per year. SC golf courses use a
> combined total of groundwater and surface water of 14,991 millon gallons per
> year.

That's insane

~~~
Merrill
SC has an area of 32,000 square miles or 20,480,000 acres. The average annual
rainfall is about 4 feet. So that is about 80 million acre-feet of
precipitation. Converting from acre feet to gallons gives 26,000,000 million
gallons of rainfall annually. Depending on hurricanes, it could be more, much
more.

------
andy_boot
I don't see why water used for cooling can't later be used as irrigation water

~~~
tyingq
It evaporates in the chiller towers.

[https://intra.ece.ucr.edu/~sren/project/water/img/water_cool...](https://intra.ece.ucr.edu/~sren/project/water/img/water_cooling.jpg)

~~~
userbinator
...and then comes down as rain somewhere else, eventually.

~~~
adrianN
If that somewhere else is too far away it won't help refill South Carolina's
aquifers.

~~~
tomatotomato37
Charleston is over the Florida aquifer system, which is one of the largest
aquifer systems in the world since the peninsula is essentially a huge
sedimentary filter that's saturated by really aggressive storms on a seasonal
basis

------
sitkack
Why ground water and not river water? Aquifers in CA are already collapsing
and will not recover.

------
Koffiepoeder
> "We strive to build sustainability into everything that we do"

I very much hope at least a part of the heat is converted back to electrical
energy...

~~~
saagarjha
This isn’t always practical.

------
zannaxy
Why are they using plain groundwater to cool servers? Maybe I'm being naive
here by thinking there is something much cooler they could do.

------
joeyrideout
SC = The state of South Carolina, for non-American readers.

It's a shame that the article doesn't define acronyms on first use.

~~~
thawaway1837
It’s a South Carolina newspaper.

I for one am glad that writers keep context in mind when writing things.

Otherwise your comment would have to be:

“SC = The state of South Carolina, one of the 50 states in the United States
of America which is a country in the continent of North America and is often
referred to as the USA, for people who don’t live in the USA.”

I think this is a good time to talk about one of my biggest pet peeves.
Aggregators like HN, while extremely useful, remove context from the articles
they link to. I think it’s extremely important for readers to read the links,
after reading the site’s about page, and maybe quickly glancing through the
Wikipedia, or bio page (of the author), if it exists.

Actively creating the context should be a skill we should be teaching children
in school, since the Internet has made things that we would otherwise never
have been aware of so easily accessible.

~~~
atomlib
Reductio ad absurdum.

------
Hitton
I'm sure that people who decided it were well compensated, who are you to
disagree?

~~~
StartupTree
Extraordinary to claim that this decision is the result of corruption, you got
any evidence or you just inventing stuff in your head?

~~~
reustle
Extraordinary? This happens all the time, maybe not with hard cash but plenty
of other methods

~~~
igetspam
It does but Google has a very very strict policy about not greasing wheels.
People have been fired over it and not reimbursed for the out of pocket
expense. It made building infrastructure in India take exponentially longer
than competitors who were willing to play according to the unspoken rules.
Google can't be trusted but not everything they do or every way they operate
is bad.

~~~
swebs
Google has spent $21,770,000 on lobbying in 2018.

[https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00006782...](https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000067823&year=2018)

~~~
igetspam
So the implied argument is that lobbying is inherently corrupt?

~~~
a_imho
In your opinion what differentiates the two?

~~~
AnthonyMouse
One of them is illegal.

~~~
Qwertious
Once you start lobbying/influencing what laws exist, you forfeit the right to
justify your actions purely on what's legal.

Mainly: if you spend large amounts of money to stop an action becoming illegal
or to make it legal, then you can't justify the action by saying "it's legal"
without also justifying why it _should_ be legal - given that you just
assisted create a law. Amoral actors should not be allowed to control the
legal system that keeps them in line.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
Is there some evidence that Google has been a significant force lobbying in
favor of the laws that make lobbying legal?

------
ensiferum
Wow using ground water to cool down computers? Is there no other water supply
available?

Ofc a Google rep says how they are environmentally committed. Obv they'd never
say if they didn't give a shit. What a useless comment.

Clean unpolluted ground water is probably the most precious resource there is.

~~~
londons_explore
Sewage (after treatment) can also be used to cool servers. Some big companies
do this.

I'd guess groundwater was cheaper than sewage in this specific location.

~~~
andrekandre
what about seawater?

i know that san onofre used to be cooled that way... or do they require
basically non saline water for this...

~~~
dredmorbius
Seawater is very hard and harsh to deal with.

The intakes tend to clog with marine growth -- everything from barnacles and
oysters to algae. Pipes have to be corrosion-reistant (not iron or steel). If
you're using evaporative cooling, you end up with saline concentrate. If
you're using dual-cycle systems ("clean" inner cooling loop, "dirty" outer
loop), you have the issue of dumping thermal load into the oceans, which can
affect sea life. And to boot, east-coast US seawater isn't all that cold due
to the Gulf Stream -- 22-26C (72-76F) off the coast of the Carolinas, though
subsurface temps may be lower. California's coastal waters are far cooler,
about 15C (60F) presently, and dropping toward 10C (50F) in winter.

