The UK’s largest proposed datacentre is understating the scale of its planned water use, according to an analysis.
The first phase of construction for the hyperscale campus in Cambois in Northumberland has been given the go-ahead by the local council. The US operator QTS, which is developing the site, has promoted its “water-free” cooling system as proof of its sustainability.
But research published this week calls that claim into question. A study of the power and water footprints of AI production by the data scientist Alex de Vries-Gao highlights the underestimated scale of indirect, or embedded, water consumption caused by datacentre operations.
QTS estimates the two initial data halls will consume 2.3m litres of water annually, according to documents it submitted to Northumberland county council. Yet applying De Vries-Gao’s methodology to the electricity generation required for the site’s AI servers produces a figure more than 50 times higher, at 124m litres a year, according to analysis by Watershed Investigations and the Guardian.
How much water does a data centre use?
How much does the data centre use?
How much does the 3lectricity to feed the data centre use?
The two are, clearly, quite different. But if you’re against a data centre (seems to be the latest Greenpeace et al shriek) then you’ll use the one that has water flowing in and out of a nuclear power plant as being the same as that evaporated off a data dentre cooling system.
Lyin’ bastards.
They don’t USE any water. At most, they deny everyone else some water for about 10 days, as it goes in, cools the servers, warms up, evaporates and comes back as rain. So that 2m litres is 55,000 litres taken out of other use. And Northumbria ain’t exactly Arrakis.
Fun thought on this: people used to put data centres in the central belt of Scotland. Are companies sticking them as far north as they can, while avoiding risks of what the Nats might do to them?
Yeah, the Water Cycle is a thing! (especially since the water won’t be polluted)
I don’t think I would want to drink data center outflow. Yes in principle it’s only flowed over a bunch of heat exchangers, but none of those parts will have been designed or installed with a view to the water coming out the other end being safe to drink.
I would expect at least detectable amounts of light-metal and plastic contamination, which isn’t too bad if you only drank of glass of it, but if you used the runoff to supply a village’s drinking water or dumped it on a field to leech, the metals and plastics would accumulate in the soil/humans.
I doubt the water coming out is any less drinkable than the water going in.
Which is to say that you’re going to want to purify it regardless. Especially if they’re using ocean water.
Nononono, WB…. What goes into the Data center is pristine unsullied natural H2O, blessed by Mother Gaia.
What evaporates from the coolers is evil industrial Oxidane waste, cursed by the Evil Capitalists.
And worse… Due to the heat transfer it causes Excitement! And Puritans and Excitement…. weeeellll… not the best of pals…
I think the Scotland placement had to do with cable landings, the promise of Cheap Green Energy ( rofl!! suckers….) , and generally much lower temperatures year round which increases the efficiency of the cooling system. Which matters when you’re pumping 100’s of kWh of heat around….
They use potable water, transforming it into waste water (the article said “consume”, our host introduced the term “use”). When I “consume” water, it’s not used up, but I don’t think you would want to consume it.
The article is written by a “journalist”, using the lines fed to him or her by the Green spokesman.
The water supply doesn’t have to be potable. The data center can have its own demineralization plant, which it may do anyway to get the water extra sparkly clean, yessir.
Why aren’t they closed systems ? Shirley running the water through enough insulated pipes/condensors should allow it to cool down enough to pass through the machinery again.
Or use the water to heat a swimming pool, like Cray used to do.
>Why aren’t they closed systems
Because
– boiling off water takes a significantly larger amount of energy than just heating it to 100 degrees, and you don’t actually need to heat the water to 100 degrees to boil it. This is the principle behind both sweating and cooling towers.
– it’s simply cheaper to let the environment cool your water than it is to build a load of machines and cool it yourself. This is why a lot of power stations are by the coast and cool themselves by pumping seawater through.
Microsoft has experimented with hermetically sealing data corridors in a nitrogen atmosphere then dumping the whole lot in the sea, to reasonable success: yes it’s literally impossible to service anything, but the savings in upfront cost and cooling outweigh this, and when it’s pulled up all the insides are obsolete anyway and the whole thing can be trucked away and parted/recycled.
They could build a 24×7 gay sauna next door. That’d use a lot of the excess steam
Data centres tend not to be near the gays. They’re on the outskirts of non-fabulous places like Slough and Swansea.
Apparently there is one going up in Hayes Middx.
So I see your point.
Is 2.3m litres per year a lot? Is 124m litres?
How does that compare to, for example, local government buildings in Northumberland?
If they “used” one litre of water these bastards would be crying about it. It’s past time to meet with representatives of the environmentalists and have them all shot.
The problem with these sorts of environmentalists is that they’re puritan loons. Like you might come up with a bus road, and insist on only electric buses running on it. Which could be a lot greener than loads of people driving cars to work. But they’ll be opposed to it because a bit of woodland has to be chopped down. They have no idea about trade-offs.
Same with data centres. People complain about the environmental costs of streaming, but it’s a lot greener than driving to Blockbuster Video.
But less green than everyone watching what Channel Five decides they’ll watch. This is why you can leave a broadcast TV station on all day, but youtube and netflix bug you all the time to ask if you’re still watching.
Saw a really interesting take on the electric bus: it uses a pantograph to charge itself where it was sensible to put the power lines, and a battery on the windy streets and hills where it wasn’t. Pantograph means it can charge without needing to loiter at a bus stop or go home to the depot.
https://masstransit.network/mass-transit-news/vdl-bus-coach/vdl-bus-coach-and-kvb-expand-cologne-fleet-to-113-electric-citeas
You mean, someone’s invented a trolleybus?
Well a trolleybus with its own battery so you only have to put the wires at a few stops/sections across the route where it’s easy and unproblematic and potentially shared between dozens of routes.
Which means you can have
>an electric bus
without
>they’ll be opposed to it because a bit of woodland has to be chopped down
Fuck that. What makes buses work is that they’re an off-the-shelf item, and controlled by the driver, which allows for more competition for vehicles, drivers and routes.
Once you add in some specific bollocks like a pantograph, you’ve now got to do everything specific. Pantograph buses from one company that works with one load of pantographs and no doubt specialist drivers. So you end up with state-run buses rather than private competition.
>you end up with state-run buses rather than private competition.
The UK has off-the-shelf non-pantograph buses, yet we have state buses and no competition. So it’s probably not the bus manufacturers or the electricity.
In the UK, almost all local bus services (where it would make sense to have en-route charging) are either a “private company” that’s really owned/controlled by the local council, or an actual private company that still operates with local monopoly and no realistic competition.
It doesn’t matter if there is only one company that dominates in a town. The threat still exists that another one could move in.
No the “bug you all the time” is because they’re feeding you ads (for the cheaper plans), and being charged and/or buying shows based on views. Which assumes you’re watching.
If there’s a stream that isn’t being watched, that shouldn’t count for money being spent. And they can do much more to find out if someone is watching than depending on people to write it down in a notebook and mail it in.
And yes, it does cost them to send bytes to you (not much, but some). So there’s that too. Freezing the screen with a dialog stops that flow.
They could have made TVs that required periodic interaction, but they didn’t think of it. And then persuading people that this is a better version might be difficult.
They could have made TVs that required periodic interaction,
They’ve been around for a while.
>yes, it does cost them to send bytes to you (not much, but some).
Now multiply that by the service’s entire multimillion userbase, and you’ve hit on the reason why they do it: each customer they unicast to costs them money, money it wouldn’t cost a broadcaster.
It can’t be adverts, because Netflix and iPlayer don’t have adverts, but still want to turn off the tap if you don’t keep turning it back on. It can’t be paying the authors for views, because iPlayer still does this when it’s playing its own content and not having to pay itself.
It’s outrageous! It’s not as though water just falls out of the sky, is it?!
Oh, wait…
I like their way of calculation…
By their reasoning and calculations, a coal-, oil, or nuclear plant would never, ever, use any resources while actually running.
After all, anything it uses is deferred to the users, and *cannot* be used again to calculate use at the source ( the energy plant in question )
Which means a coal plant *cannot possibly* produce that dreaded CO2 they’re all huffy about, so we can build plenty of them…
So…. What’s the water, CO2, Nitrogen, etc…. deferred footprint of a Guardian hack, and why has it not
rubbed the lotion… errmmm paid his/her EcoTax like a good little drone?>so we can build plenty of them
But there would be no need for one, because all the evil electricity users, and their CO2 emissions, would already have been eliminated.
I think we just invented the carbon tax.
The average 1 person household uses 150 litres per day. A 4 person household 450 l/d. So 2.3M l/year = 42 1 person flats or 14 houses. Doesn’t seem so big now does it?
Water is billed in cubic metres. I use just under 50 m3 a year.
1000 litres per metre. ( Actually nearer 45, but let’s round it up).
Assuming worst case 124m litres
Just under two and a half thousand Otto equivalents
“Who owns Kielder Reservoir?
The reservoir is owned by Northumbrian Water and holds 200 billion litres of water.”
It’s the “big numbers” thing again… OK, 124million litres is a moderate drop of water, but when I lived in the Severn Valley that much water flowed past the end of my garden every ten minutes in the winter. Puts it in perspective somewhat.
Yeah. It useful to use something you know as a yardstick.there’s 31.5 million seconds in year. So the data center cooling’s about equivalent to leaving your bathroom basin tap running.
IOW the entire data centre can be cooled by the flow from one bathroom tap? That rather inverts the story, doesn’t it?
Providing your tap’s tank fed, yeah. If you’re combi & mains fed, far less. Say it’s less than a teacup of water a second. I just got out the shower set on fine spray & it’s about what that was delivering..
At 124M litres / year, that’s about 4 litres / second. Seems a significant teacup, BiS – or a large leak.
Suggest you read the piece quoted
The electricity generation figure’s nonsense & can be ignored. Water employed in electricity generation isn’t used. It’s abstracted, run through the plant & returned to where it came from. What they supposed to be doing with it? Bottling it?
Using this idiot’s logic, the tankers sailing past here are “using” up the Med at hundreds of thousands of tons a second & I’ll soon be able to walk to Morocco.
The numerate classes often write that as pi x 10^7.
Us innumerate classes would say equivalent rate to pouring beer out of a can. Whether you want pie with your beer’s up to you
And beer’s measured to 10³ accuracy.
‘consume’
Morons.
Build all your datacentres in South Carolina! We have plentiful water and electricity!
Their article reads like their fine journalists polished up a campaigner’s public release. Harmsworth’s explaining to others what they don’t understand.
Northumberland has a surplus of water. Keilder was built when they expected Tyneside would need huge amounts of water for booming heavy industry, that heavy industry never appeared, light industry and better water use displaced it, resulting in Keilder having an oversupply close to 100%.
No – Kielder was built by Northumbrian (not Northumberland – it included Durham and Cleveland) Water to make sure they had ample water to supply ICI in Cleveland (mostly on Tees-side) as ICI was the locals’ main hope for new , good, industrial jobs to replace those lost as the mines closed.