Data Centers' Hidden Water Cost: 3.4 Trillion Gallons a Year
Water Behind the Watts: The Hidden Risk of Powering Data Centers
A new report from Ceres reveals that the electricity powering U.S. data centers consumes far more water than the cooling systems inside the facilities. Across seven states hosting half of the nation's data centers, power generation uses about 3.4 trillion gallons of freshwater annually—12 times the combined water use of Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Washington, D.C. Most of that electricity comes from water-stressed regions, yet few data center operators or power producers account for these risks. The report urges action from utilities, policymakers, and investors as AI drives rapid data center expansion.
Power generation makes up the bulk of the data center water use.
- spogbiper
This study is using water "withdrawal" figures rather than consumptive use. Hydroelectric plants withdraw tons of water, but it goes right back into the river it came from.
Edit - good information on this here: https://news.bgov.com/environment-and-energy/data-centers-us...
The "Consumptive Use vs. Withdrawals" section discusses the trouble with using withdrawal as a meaningful data point.
- lordgilman
This just isn't how you model water use in a practical way.
- If you're going to attribute water use via electricity to data centers you need to be fair and apply it to the rest of the electricity users. And in the end, you're just raising everyone's baseline water consumption in proportion to their electricity use. Why not leave the baseline increase out and leave water use attributed at the industry level (datacenters vs coal plants vs solar plants vs ...)?
- Different kinds of electrical generation plants use different amounts of water. To get an accurate number for an electricity consumer you're backing out the mix of generation sources in your model. You've introduced complexity to your model and reduced the precision of the answers your model gives when you could just get simpler and better answers leaving it at the industry level.
- Suppose we had a place with genuinely scarce water. There is some level of water draw that's unsustainable; you can never cross that level because it'll damage the environment. If there's ever a risk of hitting that limit you're interested in all users of water (so you can correctly model how much draw happens when XYZ business or person leaves the state) pushing you back to direct attribution at the industry level. If you can't model the effects of each choice correctly how do you know the choice you made will fix the problem?
- kingstnap
> Data centers in the states analyzed depend on about 3.4 trillion gallons of freshwater annually for electricity, around 12 times the annual water use of Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Washington D.C., combined.
> Most electricity is generated by power plants located in areas facing water stress or drought.
According to the report, the Colorado river flows through Arizona, and there are dams in Arizona that need the water to flow through them in order to produce electricity.
Remarkable insights.
What's sad about this all is that none of this is actually work that needs to be thrown out. You could absolutely use the data here in terms of informing yourself on "how at risk is the power generation capacity in these states during droughts, because it relies on water in the Colorado that might not always be available".
But instead we get bandwagon water use rage bait.