Is the shine already coming off ai & data centers?
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Another in a long line of reasoning of why we are "Missthippi State. No vision. If thick oil can be pumped from the arctic circle over several mountain ranges taller than the Rockies to Valdez, I'm pretty sure engineers could pump a little water over and up into the source of the Colorado River. Why not?
First, I want to pretend to be shocked that your take on this is 'why not do it since we have wasted money on worse things!'...but it doesnt surprise me at all.
Obvious obliviousness is always impressive to see.
As for why not do this...well here are some reasons-
- Water would need to be pumped more than 1500mi UP AND OVER THE CONTINENTAL DIVIDE.
- The distance water would need to be pumped(Memphis to Lake Powell AZ) is longer than the Colorado River itself.
- The Mississippi River already experiences drought conditions impacting commerce...so pumping water away isnt exactly great.
- Less water reaching the Gulf means less sediment reaching the Gulf, which will impact land barrier quality.
- Lower water level in the Gulf means more saltwater creep in Louisiana.
- Moving fish and invasive species from the Mississippi to the Colorado and Arizona seems less than ideal.
I trust there are more reasons for 'why not'.
I took time to type out legitimate and documented reasons why not.
It sucks that you didn't read any of it.
I’d say that “depends.” There is certainly a time consideration for recharging an aquifer. If I’m using well water and blowing down, it’s certainly going back to the environment…albeit not to the original source. In most cases, the blowdown is likely going into creeks, rivers, etc. that could certainly “rob” a local aquifer of its contents.
So basically the same thing that happens in all water usage?
some of it goes back to source some of it moves to a new spot.
I did, not my fault you couldnt understand it.
We had a glut of housing in the aughts, that didn't stop an overinvestment into housing. We had an overinvestment into the internet in the late 90s. There was still a future need for the internet and more housing! Just not then!
Get the point yet? Has the market "timed" AI correctly?
Currently today we have a need for data
Currently today we have a need for energy even without the increased need from data
Currently today we have a shortage of housing
Get the point yet?
A lot of people in different countries…are finding out they aren’t as free as they think they are.
Not exactly. When groundwater is used, the question becomes “how much returns to the aquifer?” Can you answer that?
Unless you are creating a basin for it to stay in the area to eventually soak into the ground or actively pumping it back into the aquifer with a recharge pump the aquifer will lose water and not be replenished.
I’m in the industry and need to hop in here to correct a lot of misinformation.
Noise: do data centers make lots of noise? Yeah they can. You don’t want to live 300 feet from one, but most of the complaints are overblown. I’m half a mile from an interstate, and I can hear traffic from it. It just fades into the background and I rarely notice it. If you’re a 1/4 mile away from a campus, maybe it’ll be like that; maybe you won’t hear it at all.
water: Evap uses tons more water than closed loop. Pretty much everyone now uses closed loop except for Amazon. They’ll move that way within the next couple of years. The largest Evap campuses use a similar amount of water to a soybean or corn farm on the same property. Uses less than what a rice farm would use. But since most are closed loop now, they use as much as an office building. It’s nothing. Fast food restaurants use more water.
Power: they use massive amounts of power. So what? You aren’t paying for it. No deals are actually getting completed in the industry unless the data center user is paying for all the infrastructure upgrades and is guarantying the power contract with investment grade credit. The costs aren’t being passed on to the public. A portion of the infrastructure costs were being passed on to the ratebase roughly 5-10 years ago in places like northern Virginia, but it’s not happening now. The users are footing the bill for everything. I wish that weren’t the case- it would make my life easier.
jobs: data centers create a relatively small amount of permanent jobs compared to the overall investment and building sizes. But the jobs that are provided are very well paying. And there’s also indirect support industries that create jobs that are never calculated into data center job figures. They do create thousands of great commercial construction jobs for several years. Have a teenage son- tell him to skip college and become a commercial electrician. He’ll make a fortune fast.
taxes: this is the reason why you want data centers in your town. They pay massive local taxes. There’s a reason why Loudoun County, VA went from “in the sticks” to one of the most desirable counties in the whole country. Their school systems were transformed and massively invested through the data center taxes. Think about it- the county with the most data centers in the world (over 100) happens to be one of the most desired places to live. If data centers were so awful for the community, Loudon would be avoided like the plague.
News: the reason why so much anti data center sentiment is popping up on your newsfeeds and algorithms is in a large part from Chinese actors wanting to slow US AI progress and global NGOs who have pivoted from climate change propaganda peddling to data center propaganda peddling. They’ve realized that they can be effective by leveraging their protest organizations to organize local populations and saturate Facebook feeds with BS, it’s really cheap to get the masses to bite because the industry is not very known.
bottom line: no development type is better for your community. It puts little to no strain on local infrastructure (roads, schools, hospitals, etc), pays more taxes than anything else by orders of magnitude, and brings a few high paying jobs to go with it. It boggles my mind the current state of discourse around data centers. My industry has completely lost the messaging war. The states and localities which champion data centers will become immensely more wealthy as a result from geographic competition getting annihilated across the country.
Noise: do data centers make lots of noise? Yeah they can. You don’t want to live 300 feet from one, but most of the complaints are overblown. I’m half a mile from an interstate, and I can hear traffic from it. It just fades into the background and I rarely notice it. If you’re a 1/4 mile away from a campus, maybe it’ll be like that; maybe you won’t hear it at all.
water: Evap uses tons more water than closed loop. Pretty much everyone now uses closed loop except for Amazon. They’ll move that way within the next couple of years. The largest Evap campuses use a similar amount of water to a soybean or corn farm on the same property. Uses less than what a rice farm would use. But since most are closed loop now, they use as much as an office building. It’s nothing. Fast food restaurants use more water.
Power: they use massive amounts of power. So what? You aren’t paying for it. No deals are actually getting completed in the industry unless the data center user is paying for all the infrastructure upgrades and is guarantying the power contract with investment grade credit. The costs aren’t being passed on to the public. A portion of the infrastructure costs were being passed on to the ratebase roughly 5-10 years ago in places like northern Virginia, but it’s not happening now. The users are footing the bill for everything. I wish that weren’t the case- it would make my life easier.
jobs: data centers create a relatively small amount of permanent jobs compared to the overall investment and building sizes. But the jobs that are provided are very well paying. And there’s also indirect support industries that create jobs that are never calculated into data center job figures. They do create thousands of great commercial construction jobs for several years. Have a teenage son- tell him to skip college and become a commercial electrician. He’ll make a fortune fast.
taxes: this is the reason why you want data centers in your town. They pay massive local taxes. There’s a reason why Loudoun County, VA went from “in the sticks” to one of the most desirable counties in the whole country. Their school systems were transformed and massively invested through the data center taxes. Think about it- the county with the most data centers in the world (over 100) happens to be one of the most desired places to live. If data centers were so awful for the community, Loudon would be avoided like the plague.
News: the reason why so much anti data center sentiment is popping up on your newsfeeds and algorithms is in a large part from Chinese actors wanting to slow US AI progress and global NGOs who have pivoted from climate change propaganda peddling to data center propaganda peddling. They’ve realized that they can be effective by leveraging their protest organizations to organize local populations and saturate Facebook feeds with BS, it’s really cheap to get the masses to bite because the industry is not very known.
bottom line: no development type is better for your community. It puts little to no strain on local infrastructure (roads, schools, hospitals, etc), pays more taxes than anything else by orders of magnitude, and brings a few high paying jobs to go with it. It boggles my mind the current state of discourse around data centers. My industry has completely lost the messaging war. The states and localities which champion data centers will become immensely more wealthy as a result from geographic competition getting annihilated across the country.
Been trying to get the knuckleheads on here to listen to this since the beginning of this thread. You're right. The Chinese and European billionaire actors have won the messaging war. I've spent a lot of time talking to Mike Turner in Loudoun county VA. To avoid the pitfalls they went through.
There you go. And Loudon’s most notable issues came from two data centers. The data center owners located them in industrially zoned sites and followed all city ordinances on noise- in fact, going way beyond anything that was required. And the residents who raised a stink were the ones living next to those two data centers. They chose those houses knowing it was directly next to and 150 feet from industrial land.
If you dont understand the concept of overbuilding current capacity based on a miscalculation of future need, then i cant help you.
I sit on a state groundwater committee trying to find solutions to preserve the alluvial aquifer. I think I know.
I know you’re all in on the data centers and that’s fine. I think your county is doing it the smart way.
Don’t patronize me because it’s not fitting your argument.
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So if a locality looks into a proposed deal, and they aren't getting the above, they're being cheated and should pass on the deal unless it is in line with the above? Deal.
It’s going back into the global amount of water somewhere. Water is not lost or destroyed.
No it might not be in the local spot but some places have an over abundance of water and some are in drought.
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But we aren’t overbuilt. That’s a fact.
is it possible we over build? Yes. But overbuilding energy isn’t bad.
and overbuilding houses isn’t bad unless you tons of loans people can’t pay.
I didn’t read what you typed but we absolutely can pump water to places. Like he said, we do it with crude oil and water is way easier to handle that crude oil.
“Closed loop cooling” and “evaporative cooling” are not mutually exclusive terms. I’m beginning to think the impasse is because you DC engrs just have your own lingo. Do data centers using closed loop cooling ALWAYS use fans to reject heat from the loop? If so, I will acquiesce and go forward with the understanding that you have nomenclature different from the rest of industry — and that’s OK.
I can show you dozens of closed loop cooling circuits that use massive amounts of evaporative cooling. Common propane and propylene (and likely ammonia) refrigeration systems in the petrochemical industry are closed loop AND use evaporative cooling. What matters is where the heat from the loop is being rejected — to air or to water.
The process for getting water back into the aquifer is not easy. If it was so easy it wouldn’t be an issue.
It may be difficult in some areas but it’s a pretty natural process
Rainfall and snowmelt soaking directly into the ground (Infiltration)
Water leaking through the bottom and sides of riverbeds, creeks, and lakes
Standing water sitting in natural wetlands and floodplains
Surface water diverted into engineered, open-air infiltration basins
Treated water pumped directly underground via high-pressure injection wells
Stormwater funneled down shallow vadose zone (dry) wells to bypass clay barriers
Flooding dormant agricultural fields with excess winter river water (Ag-MAR)
Building check dams and leaky weirs to slow down and trap flash floods in dry riverbeds
Constructing artificial beaver dams to slow streams and push water into valley soils
Using permeable pavements and bioswales to let urban stormwater sink into the ground
0 surprise you didn't read the well discussed and accepted concerns.
Being able to do something doesn't mean it should be done.
If you and leeinator are unable to acknowledge and address very real concerns, then this is yet another discussion where your comments are unserious and not worth valuing.
Actually most of it isn’t. Only about 10%-20% makes it back into an aquifer.
The Richland Parish Meta data center will use closed loop cooling. See end of page 2 here. https://datacenters.atmeta.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Metas-Richland-Parish-Data-Center.pdf
Also, per https://www.therichlandbeaconnews.c...r-will-data-center-use?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Also, per https://www.therichlandbeaconnews.c...r-will-data-center-use?utm_source=chatgpt.com
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