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Comment by rhdunn | Hacker News Reader

Data centres consuming electricity isn't the problem. The problem is running those data centres on fossil fuels.

There has been an increased push to run the data centres on green technologies like solar, wind, and nuclear, e.g. [1]. Due to the machines being co-located makes it easier to do this compared to every website being hosted on machines spread over the country, where it is more likely that they will be run by fossil fuels.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/rush-data-centers-cr...

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Another problem is water consumption. People don't realize it, but these data centers also consume incredible amounts of fresh water.

There are a handful that run off of grey water, and it varies somewhat - but overall the consumption is enormous. It's a big problem for water-starved areas.

How do they consume the water exactly? If it’s just heat transfer, couldn’t it be reused once it passes through the data center? I would assume a small and cold country like Ireland could make good use of warm water, especially given its #2 ranking on tea consumption per capita!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tea_consu...

A datacenter could consume a lot of water with evaporative cooling. I don't know how prevalent it is, but given how cheap and efficient evaporative cooling is, I'd guess datacenters use it a lot where possible (probably in combination with other cooling methods).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJYSzc7YkY0

I always assumed they created water from condensation, where is the water consumed?

A datacenter should be condensing as little as possible. The cold side (where condensation occurs) is the inside, but you don't want your cooling system dripping on your racks.

I wouldn't call it enormous. Some datacenters run dry cooling. A large datacenter (100MW) that uses evaporative cooling probably uses ~1000 acre-ft/yr, on par with a medium farm.

Ireland discussed here is not water-starved and with high air humidity water loss (to evaporation) in cooling towers is low anyway.

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