I’m in the energy tech world, and lemme tell ya holy shit it is hard to get through a conversation these days without saying the word datacenter.
This gets a lot of attention in my world. Load growth from AI data centers causing upward rate pressure because utilities fund new grid capacity by wrapping the capex into the rate base.
We need a simple regulation that mandates that all data centers must power themselves with renewable energy.
It’ll fix sooo many issues. Not the water thing but that’s a region-specific problem. Not everywhere has water shortages and not all data center designs use shittons of water (even AI data centers).
I am really uneducated on this, and my source is fairly unreliable (my Trump voting father and city councilor), but I’ve heard that the central Oregon data centers for Apple and Facebook are cooled with wastewater intake from the nearby municipalities. The angle on that was that it’s not wasteful to clean water sources. If it’s true, that seems like a decent solution?
Plus with water, we can just say fuck you, you don’t get to run the tap constantly for cooling, it’s a total waste of clean drinking water. Build more solar panels and figure out a less insane way
I’m in the energy tech world, and lemme tell ya holy shit it is hard to get through a conversation these days without saying the word datacenter.
This gets a lot of attention in my world. Load growth from AI data centers causing upward rate pressure because utilities fund new grid capacity by wrapping the capex into the rate base.
We need a simple regulation that mandates that all data centers must power themselves with renewable energy.
It’ll fix sooo many issues. Not the water thing but that’s a region-specific problem. Not everywhere has water shortages and not all data center designs use shittons of water (even AI data centers).
I am really uneducated on this, and my source is fairly unreliable (my Trump voting father and city councilor), but I’ve heard that the central Oregon data centers for Apple and Facebook are cooled with wastewater intake from the nearby municipalities. The angle on that was that it’s not wasteful to clean water sources. If it’s true, that seems like a decent solution?
No way they use untreated water, and no way they invest in their own water treatment.
If they’re using wastewater, that’s some shitty cooling.
I mean… It’s nice to know the executives give a crap I guess?
I like that idea a lot
Plus with water, we can just say fuck you, you don’t get to run the tap constantly for cooling, it’s a total waste of clean drinking water. Build more solar panels and figure out a less insane way