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The Register misquotes itself by writing that “Google's datacenters in Dallas, Texas consumed more than a quarter of the city's water supply”. Clicking through
by mgw 3y ago
The Register misquotes itself by writing that “Google's datacenters in Dallas, Texas consumed more than a quarter of the city's water supply”.
Clicking through to the quoted article [1], the figure is actually for The Dalles, Oregon, a city with a population about 80 times smaller than Dallas’.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/19/google_datacenters_dalles/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/19/google_datacenters_da...
- briffle 3y agoGoogle in The Dalles, OR site also uses much less water than the Aluminum smelter that used to be at their current location.
- feoren 3y agoThat's like saying they're lighter than the moon. Your fact is more about how unbelievably resource-intensive aluminum smelters are.
- MattGaiser 3y agoBut it also a reduction from peak water use in that location. That location is used to that level of resource consumption. You could of course argue it is still too high, but it is also within the current status quo.
- brookst 3y agoAnd what does “too high” mean, anyway? Using water in The Dallas is a totally different story than using it in Death Valley. Part of the reason the data center is there is the abundance of water.
- slibhb 3y agoThe fact also makes you notice that no one is writing articles about how much water smelters use...
- kibwen 3y agoBecause we have recycling centers, which reclaim aluminum using 95% less energy than smelting the raw material.
- slibhb 3y agoNo, because journalists love writing articles critical of tech companies, some fair some not.
- vasco 3y agoJournalists love writing articles people want to read. People like crapping on tech companies because they look at them everyday in their phones so it rings a bell. The average person rarely thinks of smelters or is confronted with one.
- specialist 3y agoPublishers publish clickbait. Editors and journalists do as they're told.
- pests 3y agoYou can't reclaim aluminum without first smelting it from raw.
- swarnie 3y agoI'm just shocked your even smelting in the US still, surely that's done in the near east where power + labour is far, far cheaper.
- mattnewton 3y agoI feel like _some_ domestic aluminum refining capability has to be a national security requirement, though no idea if we do treat it that way.
- swarnie 3y agoYep that's true, fully accept that.
- celestialcheese 3y agoAlcoa had a pretty large aluminum smelter on the west coast in Ferndale WA, but it shut down near the beginning of covid. The bonneville power contracts with Alcoa were pretty generous, somewhere around $0.035/kWh for ~300MW, and even then, they couldn't make it work. A PE firm is trying to buy it up, but the bonneville administration isn't playing ball and giving them the same rates, so it'll likely sit empty.
- lostlogin 3y agoWe do it in New Zealand. The power source is renewable and dirt cheap thanks to the games Rio Tinto play, which have resulted in the population subsidising them. Rio Tinto have a poor record and leave toxic waste in various places. It seems possible that the taxpayer will be tidying up their mess.
- Scoundreller 3y agoQuebec too. And Quebec is far from landlocked, so an abundance of hydroelectricity has alternative markets. The subsidies are staggering: > The total cost of $2.7 billion comes to $274,338 per job per year during 35 years for the 740 jobs in the new plant. If we use the figure of 10.0 cents/kWh, which is the expected cost of new projects under study, the cost per job per year rises to $370,864 And these are 2007 number!!! And no, the smelters aren't paying their employees FAANG wages. > It is far more profitable to export electricity directly through interconnections than indirectly through aluminum ingots. https://www.iedm.org/files/avril07_en.pdf https://www.iedm.org/files/avril07_en.pdf
- fallingknife 3y agoThe point is that water supply is a non issue because it needs 20x less than before.
- dylan604 3y agoFrom personal experience, most auto-fill fields will correctly find Dallas for "dal", but will quickly update to Dalles for "dall". Which is weird since "dalla" comes before "dalle" alphabetically which makes me think their "learned" use implies more people looking for Dalles type "dall". I've been caught out by this on multiple occasions.
- jlarocco 3y agoIt's not too weird... If it offers up "dallas" for "dal", but the user keeps typing, then it's reasonable to assume "dallas" wasn't what they were looking for, or they'd have picked it after "dal".
- szundi 3y agoI hate these autocompleters with this logic. Counterintuitive and let me not type with 1/sec just to be “helped” correctly
- ComputerGuru 3y agoOr maybe they type quickly and don’t stop after each and every letter to see the autocomplete results?
- dylan604 3y agoExactly. I'm not typing D...pause...A...pause...L wait for suggested value. I'm typing dall by the time the first suggestion has had a chance to make its appearance. Then again, I'm on a real computer with a keyboard, and not some mobile device where it's impossible to type properly and forces those pauses between letters where the autocomplete might be noticeable.
- ComputerGuru 3y agoI am in the same boat but experience this on mobile, too. They just slow everything down by the same factor.
- 3y ago
- snowwrestler 3y agoAnd The Dalles, unlike Dallas, has a huge source of water available: the mighty Columbia River, currently flowing 140,000 to 240,000 cubic feet per second (cfs). (Snowmelt causes daily surges.) The Trinity River at Dallas, TX is currently running at 400 cfs, LOL.
- shawndrost 3y agoThis makes the datacenter out to be a massive water user. Which it is, in some sense. It's also worth considering that this volume of water usage -- 274.5 million gallons per annum, or 842 acre-feet -- is about 1/3 that of an average-size (445 acre) farm.
- irrational 3y agoYou mean The Dalles that sits on the banks of the humongous Columbia River? That’s the one they are worried about using too much water? The Columbia River pours more water into the Pacific Ocean than any other river in the Western Hemisphere. Are they worried about the Pacific Ocean going dry?
- michaelcampbell 3y agoI get that it's common usage (and that's what language basically is), but when I see "80 times smaller" my brain screams "80 times what? Wouldn't `1 times smaller` be zero?" Yes, brain, yes it would.