'People sometimes invoke the idea that water moves through a cycle and never really gets destroyed, in order to suggest that we don’t need to be concerned at all about water use. But while water may not get destroyed, it can get “used up” in the sense that it becomes infeasible or uneconomic to access it.'
Side note, this personal anecdote from the author caught me off guard: "my monthly water bill is roughly 5% of the cost of my monthly electricity bill". I'm in the American southwest (but not arid desert like parts of Arizona/Nevada/Utah), and my monthly water cost averages out annually to ~60% of the cost of electricity. Makes me wonder if my water prices are high, if my electricity prices are low, if my water usage is high or my electricity usage is low.
How much water is wasted on golf courses in these arid regions? Or growing water intensive crops like alfalfa that isn’t even directly used to feed people.
People are sounding the alarm about water usage in AI data centers while ignoring the real unsustainable industries like animal agriculture.
1: https://coloradosun.com/2024/04/04/research-colorado-river-w...
2: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-emissions-...
0 - https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2025/05/09/nestle-to-s... 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l2Bas81NDY
Asimov wrote about this in Foundation. If you are not checking yourself it's blind faith in inherently self selecting dishonest people
Zero. You can't waste water, it goes in a cycle.
I mean unless you transport it off-planet.
You can waste the energy you spent cleaning it and pumping it around. But between nuclear and solar we ought to have an overabundance of that.
In a market economy, if it becomes "economically infeasible" to purify used water, the price goes up slightly, and suddenly it makes a lot more sense to treat dirty water, or even seawater.
You see the same type of argument against oil or mineral use; the idea that we'll run out. But people who argue we'll run out almost always look at confirmed reserves that are economical to extract right now. When prices rise, this sends a signal to prospectors and miners to go look for more, and it also makes far more reserves economical.
For example, Alberta's oil sands were never counted as oil reserves in bygone decades, because mining it made no sense at the time. But the economy grew per capita and overall, prices rose, and suddenly Canada is an oil-rich nation.
A similar dynamic applies to water and everything else.
Of course there are finite amounts of oil and uranium and so on, but the amounts just on this one planet are absolutely mind-boggling. The Earth has a radius of 6400km, and our deepest mines are 3-4km. We may expect richer mineral deposits (not oil) as we go further down.
Keep following this price logic and at a certain point it'll make sense to mine the far side of the moon, the asteroid belt, and so on ad infinitum.
Water billing here is (frustratingly) not progressive: the first thousand gallons costs the same as the tenth or hundredth thousand gallons. It's cheap, we're surrounded by fresh water on the surface and you can stick a well down through 80-100 feet of glacial sand and gravel and get drinkable water basically anywhere.
I was surprised to learn that 70% of my township's municipal water is used by only 15% of the households: basically, those that irrigate their lawns daily.
Doesn’t matter whether you are in the desert or not, only matters if you are in a shared watershed with them. There is huge agricultural demand for water and water rights in those areas which translates to high prices for the areas where they can source water (like your presumably more-watered location)
https://www.rcfp.org/dalles-google-oregonian-settlement/
Apparently Google uses nearly 30% of the city's water supply:
https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2022/12/googles-wa...
I highly doubt any apartment block comes close to taking 30% of a city's water supply.
You said apartments specifically and this urban form usually starts at 50 dwellings per acre, minimum, which would lead me to say the apartments use more water. The break-even point in this equation is 2-5 households per acre.
My water usage is pretty average and my electric usage is apparently hilariously low.
You’re paying money and using resources and you’ve never looked into the details?
Living in Australia where both are expensive and very finite it’s a must.
Clothing is a basic human need, whereas data centres or AI are, well, not.
To reduce this to purely "economical value" is bizarre. This is "only madmen and economists believe in infinite growth" type stuff.
As for the rest, one of the concerns is that it adds demand to an already stressed system that struggle to meet the other needs – many of which are far more critical – especially during droughts. The proverbial straw that overflowed the bucket, so to speak. Stuff like "it's 6% of the water used by US golf courses" is far too broad because in some areas there are no water shortage problems and in others there are.
Market prices can be wrong, but I think it goes too far to completely disregard them and cut back on AI rather than cotton in places where there’s relatively little water. You can buy cotton from somewhere that has more water, rather than growing it in a desert.
This completely neglects that the cotton is sold for a profit and Anthropic is doing the equivalent of selling $6B for $5B. Looking at it that way, the water used to grow cotton is producing a lot more value.
I'm not sure I even own 80lbs of clothes.
If this was an actual problem, clothing prices would go up and clothing and cotton producers would outspend the AI companies if that's where the demand was. You are anticipating a problem that doesn't exist that the market is the best tool to solve once it were to arise. Prices are a fabulous feedback mechanism. The absence of prices as signals is what made planned economies fail and this was one of the main issues in the Socialist Calculation Debate. Don't try to guess what people want or need! As long as there is no market failure (no competition, natural monopoly, etc), price signals will lead to proper resource allocation.
Something else worth considering is that many uses at least in California are non-rivalrous. Reducing one water use does not necessarily create free supply of water for some other use, since water is a physical good that must be transported, refined, stored, and delivered. The best example of this is flood irrigation for rice in northern California. Bad optics, perhaps, but the fact is the rice is grown there because it was flooded in the first place. You can stop growing rice, and that will change one of the cells in your spreadsheet, but only because the spreadsheet model isn't quite right. You can also stop feeding cattle entirely and that isn't going to help cities with chronic supply problems, like Santa Barbara, nor will it benefit large urban systems like San Francisco and EBMUD who rely on dedicated alpine supplies.
Those people aren't talking about water use, but all the infrastructure around water. If you take a plot of land that used to be occupied by a couple of single family homes and want to build a multi-story apartment building on it, you need bigger, stronger water supply infrastructure to support all those new sinks. You need bigger, stronger sewage infrastructure to support all the new drains and toilets. Not to mention better electrical infra, different garbage disposal infra, and so on. While I'm generally supportive of "moar housing" you can't just plop the housing down and say job done. You need more of everything else peripheral to and supporting that housing.
The tax base you have per meter of sprawling single family infra doesn't even necessarily cover the maintenance. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2024/4/1/heres-the-real-...
And "build moar housing" trivially entails "and the infra to go with it". You're making the opposite mistake by assuming that the solution we already have is somehow better and more affordable only by the virtue that we currently have it which would only make sense if there was no maintenance needed.
I want to know way more information about these figures... like, are there significant outliers? Drastically different usage profiles?
Plumbing fixtures are also more regulated in the EU but I suspect this is a small portion relative to landscaping.
Primarily, lawns. It's lawns. Most of the international difference in water consumption I would chalk up to lawns, given that the US has much larger average lot sizes and a much larger proportion of detached single-family houses (i.e., houses sitting in the middle of a lawn) than European countries have.
Everyone has a hose, they wash their car and water their flowers by hand.
Grass is thirsty, very thirsty.
Every time I use the toilet it uses 1.6 gallons. 6 liters...
I think in my home country more than 90% of home toilets are the "low water usage one" (with 3 and 6 liters buttons)
And that's only the start, I noticed that people just don't care about water usage over here. People take water from wells with little oversight. In my home country you need a vast amount of bureaucracy to be allowed to take water from aquifers
Also, in about half of the country, aquifers replenish as fast as they are used, so there's no point in regulating their use. The largest concern is usually whether or not the well is contaminated.
That’s still less than a cubic mile of water. Lake Mead, by comparison, has a volume of 7 cubic miles. Every American could go back to using outhouses and the water savings wouldn’t even be noticeable.
People are not very good at visualizing this stuff. The volumes involved are hard to grasp.
Or think of it this way: if you personally saved all that water by using an outhouse, it would amount to less than 300 gallons a month. My water bill doesn’t even show usage at a resolution high enough to see those savings. I’m billed per 1,000 gallons.
If the water company doesn’t care enough to track it and charge me for it, it’s noise.
Regulation can be for the greater good, and in this case it's not even mandatory.
I feel like there's a cultural difference where wastefulness is frowned upon at home but encouraged in the US. Big cars, big trucks(cars), big trucks(lorries), big (green)lawns, big roads, big houses, big servings, drive everywhere, fly everywhere, no trains, no public transport.
Everything is big except infrastructure unrelated to cars. Except for some cool dams built before something shifted.
And as others mentioned, the "water rights" which can be traded(bought up) by some evil megacorp instead of benefiting local farmers and population becaue ownership trumps everything.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/ALL/?uri=CELEX:32...
The only time they don't is when it's a toilet that's over 10 years old.
I could be wrong, especially since I mostly just use my own toilet (has two buttons, is 6 years old) or a urinal.
Also, wells are regulated in the US, with the exception of low-producing home wells. Even then, they require permitting (the degree of difficulty depends largely upon the state in question). Larger-producing wells have all kinds of reporting and usage requirements associated with them, and water rights can be the most valuable part of a plot of land.
Water and the control of it is the story of the modern American West. Even today, there are a couple of folks up in a coastal community in my county who are fighting to be able to build single family homes on property they bought decades ago. The issue is, you guessed it, water.
I’m not saying the US isn’t profligate in other areas like appliances or taking longer showers, but in most the country there’s so much land, such cheap water and very little regulation preventing you from using however much water that you want. Some of the land even comes with a guaranteed quantity of water for irrigation guaranteed, at little to no cost.
I live in an area where pretty much non of those things matter, but one of the regulations that stands out the most is that the water everywhere has to be metered, even though the reserviour near me regularly has to be drained, because it's to full to make it through the wet season.
My water districts solution was to set the price per unit of water at cost, so I pay $40/mo for insfrastructure, and a dollar or two for water. If I quadrupled my water consumption, I wouldn't even notice the price change. I actually pay more to service the meters than I pay for water.
All this does is reflect that Germany imports agriculture, while the US exports it.
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=87
Per capita, that rate puts the US in 10th place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunswick_Nuclear_Generating_S...
The water supply in Brunswick County is terribly polluted by PFAS (courtesy of DuPont, not the power plant):
https://www.nrdc.org/stories/drinking-water-crisis-north-car...
One of my favorite books is Cadillac Desert. It's about the damming of the US rivers, the water crisis, and the history of the Bureau.
It may be dwarfed by the other departments, but its had a massive impact on US population development especially in LA.
> From 1902 to 1905, Eaton, Mulholland, and others engaged in underhanded methods to ensure that Los Angeles would gain the water rights in the Owens Valley, blocking the Bureau of Reclamation from building water infrastructure for the residents in Owens Valley.[12]: 48–69 [16]: 62–69 While Eaton engaged in most of the political maneuverings and chicanery,[16]: 62 Mulholland misled Los Angeles public opinion by dramatically understating the amount of water then available for Los Angeles' growth.[16]: 73 Mulholland also misled residents of the Owens Valley; he indicated that Los Angeles would only use unused flows in the Owens Valley, while planning on using the full water rights to fill the aquifer of the San Fernando Valley. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Mulholland
This is the Mulholland of Mulholland Drive who was a major character in CD
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/99/1/bams-d-...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00344... (translation: 33.73e9 m^3/yr ≈ 24400 Mgal/day, roughly corn + alfalfa + steel)
Much of the literature is preliminary and recommends further study, but the initial estimates indicate that the amount of water that is simply lost from reservoirs is surprisingly large. So I like to yak about covering reservoirs (possibly with solar panels), which won't solve everything, but it has a far larger impact than data centers.
Aside: metric, please!
We have a swimming pool that leaks (we were quoted $125k to fix it since the deck will need replacing, and with interest rates being what they are, borrowing to fix it would be rather painful), and we use only 51gal/person/day at our home. I estimate that if fixing the pool would save another 10.
I'd assume so. Would be interesting to see the water usage comparison between city dwellers and suburbanites.
While this is "a lot" of water, when we've had an irrigation leak in a zone that runs for 5 or 10 minutes, the number can balloon to 900 gallons in a day.
The amount of water used by people who actually don't closely monitor and track their usage, with big properties, lots of plants and lawn to irrigate, must be truly mind-boggling. I wouldn't be surprised if tens of thousands of gallons per day was pretty common at a lot of houses.
In my experience with municipal utility districts, the reliability of the water supply is typically not much better than the local power grid. The sewage lift stations seem to have the highest quality generator arrangements.
Both of these services have been phenomenally reliable everywhere I’ve lived in the United States. The only exception was in a town where we’d get ice storms once a year that would bring trees down on top of power lines, but it was shocking how quickly a truck would show up and fix them all.
I can’t actually think of a time my water has stopped working anywhere except once when the road was torn up and pipes had to be replaced. I wasn’t home, we just got letters explaining when it would happen and how to flush the pipes when it was done.
Is this the norm for most places in the US?
Where I live our water/sewer bill averages out to a little over $100 a month.
So...if the US replaces all of its old nuclear power plants, we would free up almost 40% of water used today?
Furthermore, heat exchangers can use wastewater. This is done at the Palo Verde nuclear plant, for example.
FTFA: “thermoelectric power plants — plants that use heat to produce steam to drive a turbine.”
Also, it might be just to show that the other landmass neighboring is not getting anything.
I say that's a darn good use of water. Fore!
> Per Lawrence Berkeley Lab[1], in 2023, data centers used around 48 million gallons of water a day directly for cooling. Most of this water will evaporate as part of the cooling process[2], and is thus consumed.
[1]: https://eta-publications.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12...
[2]: https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/04/how_datacenters_use_w...
Of course, the notion of a water shortage in a country where two of the largest rivers in Europe empty in the North Sea and that keeps about a third of it's land that lies below sea levels dry by actively pumping relatively clean water out is a bit of a weird notion to sell. We have a surplus of water, not a shortage. Rivers overflowing their dikes is an issue we deal with regularly. And a lot of infrastructure to dump that into the North Sea by the millions of liters per day.
The issue isn't that there isn't more clean water than we can handle but that more water gets taken from limited ground water reserves than is added back naturally. This would be a non-issue if we'd mostly use surface water instead.
Most of this ground water isn't even used by consumers but by agriculture. And worse, farmers also work very hard to keep their land dry after irrigating it because they need the ground to be moist, not soaking wet as in a swamp. The water that they drain is very high in nutrients because they are using a lot of fertilizer too. So, basically, agriculture is in the business of taking rain water that dumps on their land and surrounding lands and basically dumping it into rivers without even using it for irrigation. But then when it doesn't rain, they use ground water to irrigate, which then drains into rivers. As a result, nature is suffering because ground water levels are dropping and because surface water is polluted. Ground water is also used for consumers.
The solution is of course to use slightly more expensive to use water from e.g. surface water or rain water (which is generally drained to get rid of it ASAP). Of course a lot of that water isn't as easy to access everywhere so it requires infrastructure (pipes) or storage (reservoirs). But historically, ground water was there and relatively clean (so it can be used without much processing) and people just use it without thinking about it. Most people with gardens don't even capture the water that falls on their roofs, which on an annual basis should be plenty to water their gardens. Neither are they (re)using grey water or rain water for e.g. flushing their toilets. All of that is done using tap water that comes from ground water.
This isn't a shortage crisis but a water abuse crisis. The solution is being a bit smarter about what water we use for which purpose. And a lot of that is rethinking intensive agriculture. We grow crops to feed cattle that produces so much manure that we have severe nitrogen pollution getting in the way of economic growth because we have to limit construction in/near polluted areas. Those crops uses ground water and feed the cattle. The problems are connected.
Of course, if we nullified that system, we'd have a new problem; lack of agriculture.
With the second AI gold rush coming to a near abrupt stop, political climates worsening, billionaires continuing to loot the collective populace through their pawns in the kakistocracy (USA) and kleptocracy (Russia). We are absolutely cooked.
What’s the point anymore? What are we even solving? Being a _good_ person is no longer worth any value. Just exploit and climb over each other like crabs in barrel.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/09/1...
Birth rates are below replacement nearly everywhere. That’s going to cause extinction far sooner than climate change will.
The interesting thing is watching as they all complain about the consequences of stifling growth without realizing that’s what’s happening.
“I don’t want any more housing here. It’s too expensive”
Totally retarded but fortunately I’ve figured out my way around this stuff.
