This article makes several disingenuous statements to paint an entirely false, emotion provoking narrative.
First: Google is not "consuming" water any more than a water wheel or dam turbine "consumes" water as it passes by in a river. This is an objectively absurd framing.
Second: Even if the water were consumed, which it isn't, 25% of a town of 16k is not a significant amount of consumption.
Third: This article talks about drought, which is absolutely irrelevant because the water isn't being consumed. The article can't directly say that google is culpable for water shortages, because they aren't, but it tries very hard to create this implication in the mind of lazy readers.
Where's he water that passes through the facility go? Does it go into the fresh water reservoir for the city, or the sewer, or into a river? If it isn't going directly to the city's residents in some fashion without needing to be treated, I think it's pretty reasonable to say "consumed".
To say it more succinctly: the water you flush down the toilet in your house is, in fact, "consumed".
> Data center cooling is usually the area where the greatest savings can be realized. That's true for Google, which describes its use of evaporative cooling techniques, and provides a diagram of the workings of one of the cooling towers at its data center in The Dalles, Oregon.
Still, the evaporative cooling towers are the things that are there and take water from the ground and turn it into steam, released into the air.
Yeah, it looks like some (most?) water is evaporated -- but a significant portion is also returned to the river.
I saw elsewhere that google "consumes" around 4x as much water for hydroelectric power generation as they use for cooling. Hydroelectric will return essentially all the water back to the source.
> Google’s data centers are right by the Columbia River. Why can’t the company just get its water out of the river?
> Federal law strictly governs water use from rivers. Anderson says withdrawals from the Columbia generally aren’t permitted.
> There are exceptions in cases where waters users can provide a “bucket for bucket replacement” of any water they pull out, Anderson told a city council meeting in September. In such a case, though, a water user would have to find water to put into the Columbia someplace else to compensate for water being pulled out by the city, or by Google.
So, if Google was to use Columbia river water, condense it, and then return exactly the amount that it took it, there wouldn't be an issue.
> Areas where groundwater depletion is a concern are in the Umatilla area, and the Palouse slope. In the Umatilla area, total decline since the 1970s is from 300 ft to 100 ft of water height. Overall, between 1968-2009, mean groundwater decline across the aquifer system was at 1.0 ft/year.
A lot of the water is consumed, because The Dalles makes heavy use of evaporative cooling. But this is a data enter that powers most of Google's west-coast operations; it was like #3 by number of cores in my day (though it's been eclipsed since then, and I think there's several that are several times it's size).
Cooling datacenters takes a lot of power and water, but a trivial amount compared to... Any heavy industry. Get me numbers compared to say Intel's Albuquerque fab, and then we'll talk.
First: Google is not "consuming" water any more than a water wheel or dam turbine "consumes" water as it passes by in a river. This is an objectively absurd framing.
Second: Even if the water were consumed, which it isn't, 25% of a town of 16k is not a significant amount of consumption.
Third: This article talks about drought, which is absolutely irrelevant because the water isn't being consumed. The article can't directly say that google is culpable for water shortages, because they aren't, but it tries very hard to create this implication in the mind of lazy readers.