8 ms·

How does the US use water?

241 points by juliangamble 1y ago

bob1029 1y ago
> Water in the US is generally both widely available and inexpensive: my monthly water bill is roughly 5% of the cost of my monthly electricity bill, and the service is far more reliable. In my experience with municipal utility districts, the reliability of the water supply is typically not much better than the local power grid. The sewage lift stations seem to have the highest quality generator arrangements.
- bcrosby95 1y ago
  Really? I've never turned my tap and and not had water come out. But we get several power outages per year.
  - password4321 1y ago
    Water infrastructure outages are typically due to failures needing repairs (relevant to this discussion: water main breaks which lead to boil water advisories). Few municipalities are fiscally responsible enough to invest in all the preventative maintenance required to completely avoid failures across all types of infrastructure (a low-priority budget item when things are working smoothly), but it also takes decades for water mains to fail.
- thanhhaimai 1y ago
  It's interesting you said that. My experience is the opposite. In my last 10 years in California, I've had power outages a couple times a year (mostly due to storm / trees falling on the electrical lines). But I don't recall a time I got water cut off.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  > In my experience with municipal utility districts, the reliability of the water supply is typically not much better than the local power grid. Both of these services have been phenomenally reliable everywhere I’ve lived in the United States. The only exception was in a town where we’d get ice storms once a year that would bring trees down on top of power lines, but it was shocking how quickly a truck would show up and fix them all. I can’t actually think of a time my water has stopped working anywhere except once when the road was torn up and pipes had to be replaced. I wasn’t home, we just got letters explaining when it would happen and how to flush the pipes when it was done.
  - cogman10 1y ago
    In the small town I lived in, we'd pretty frequently get water boiling notifications with our old water tower. Once that was replaced we never got a water boiling notice.
  - dlcarrier 1y ago
    At least from what I've seen in my area, interruptions in water service don't result in a lack of pressure or flow, they result in contamination, and the water districts have to issue boil water orders. It's not a problem you would notice, and if you don't pay attention to local news, you might just end up drinking contaminated water.
- evantbyrne 1y ago
  Where do you live? I don't think I've ever lost water without a power outage.
  - rconti 1y ago
    I've never lost water, period, and I've had multi-day power outages.
- Goronmon 1y ago
  Water in the US is generally both widely available and inexpensive: my monthly water bill is roughly 5% of the cost of my monthly electricity bill, and the service is far more reliable. Is this the norm for most places in the US? Where I live our water/sewer bill averages out to a little over $100 a month.
recallingmemory 1y ago
Vox did a great video visualizing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0gN1x6sVTc&ab_channel=Vox https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0gN1x6sVTc&ab_channel=Vox
TMWNN 1y ago
I recently learned that Las Vegas recycles 100% of its drinking water.
- adrr 1y ago
  Orange County California does the same. Injects treated wastewater back into the aquifer. Largest toilet to tap system in the world.
  - rufus_foreman 1y ago
    "Toilet to Tap" would be a great name for a California brewpub.
    - rconti 1y ago
      My local brewery made a beer out of recycled water. It's not legal to sell, though. https://www.devilscanyon.com/epic-onewater-brew.html https://www.devilscanyon.com/epic-onewater-brew.html
- drewg123 1y ago
  I guess that explains why the water there tastes so nasty. The only places in the US that I ever seek out bottled water are Las Vegas and Phoenix. The water in both places tastes nasty and often comes out of the tap very warm..
jackconsidine 1y ago
> The closest thing the federal government has to a department of water infrastructure, the Bureau of Reclamation, has an annual budget of just $1.1 billion. One of my favorite books is Cadillac Desert. It's about the damming of the US rivers, the water crisis, and the history of the Bureau. It may be dwarfed by the other departments, but its had a massive impact on US population development especially in LA. > From 1902 to 1905, Eaton, Mulholland, and others engaged in underhanded methods to ensure that Los Angeles would gain the water rights in the Owens Valley, blocking the Bureau of Reclamation from building water infrastructure for the residents in Owens Valley.[12]: 48–69 [16]: 62–69 While Eaton engaged in most of the political maneuverings and chicanery,[16]: 62 Mulholland misled Los Angeles public opinion by dramatically understating the amount of water then available for Los Angeles' growth.[16]: 73 Mulholland also misled residents of the Owens Valley; he indicated that Los Angeles would only use unused flows in the Owens Valley, while planning on using the full water rights to fill the aquifer of the San Fernando Valley. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Mulholland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Mulholland This is the Mulholland of Mulholland Drive who was a major character in CD
- blackguardx 1y ago
  For many years, they piped the entirety of the Owens River to LA, over a hundred miles away and over a mountain range. It is wild that the follies of Los Angeles water management has led to permanent scars in the east side of California from Mono Lake to the Salton Sea disaster.
jeffbee 1y ago
What a great article. Definitely bookmarking this for reference. People who oppose housing construction often invoke "but what about the water??" as their argument, while the fact is that California cities use less water per capita and overall than they did 50 years ago, almost entirely because of better toilets. The last couple of charts really highlight that trend. Something else worth considering is that many uses at least in California are non-rivalrous. Reducing one water use does not necessarily create free supply of water for some other use, since water is a physical good that must be transported, refined, stored, and delivered. The best example of this is flood irrigation for rice in northern California. Bad optics, perhaps, but the fact is the rice is grown there because it was flooded in the first place. You can stop growing rice, and that will change one of the cells in your spreadsheet, but only because the spreadsheet model isn't quite right. You can also stop feeding cattle entirely and that isn't going to help cities with chronic supply problems, like Santa Barbara, nor will it benefit large urban systems like San Francisco and EBMUD who rely on dedicated alpine supplies.
- ryandrake 1y ago
  > People who oppose housing construction often invoke "but what about the water??" as their argument, while the fact is that California cities use less water per capita and overall than they did 50 years ago, almost entirely because of better toilets. Those people aren't talking about water use, but all the infrastructure around water. If you take a plot of land that used to be occupied by a couple of single family homes and want to build a multi-story apartment building on it, you need bigger, stronger water supply infrastructure to support all those new sinks. You need bigger, stronger sewage infrastructure to support all the new drains and toilets. Not to mention better electrical infra, different garbage disposal infra, and so on. While I'm generally supportive of "moar housing" you can't just plop the housing down and say job done. You need more of everything else peripheral to and supporting that housing.
  - jeffbee 1y ago
    You, like them, are wrong, for reasons that I already explained. These urban systems were designed to deliver and were in fact delivering more water 50 years ago than they do currently. Much more. They are underutilized! Building the apartments only takes them marginally up in the direction of their design capacity.
newfocogi 1y ago
I found a lot of value in this article. Out of frustration with people who are alarmist over how much water a datacenter "consumes" compared to households, I've probably erred too often towards: 'People sometimes invoke the idea that water moves through a cycle and never really gets destroyed, in order to suggest that we don’t need to be concerned at all about water use. But while water may not get destroyed, it can get “used up” in the sense that it becomes infeasible or uneconomic to access it.' Side note, this personal anecdote from the author caught me off guard: "my monthly water bill is roughly 5% of the cost of my monthly electricity bill". I'm in the American southwest (but not arid desert like parts of Arizona/Nevada/Utah), and my monthly water cost averages out annually to ~60% of the cost of electricity. Makes me wonder if my water prices are high, if my electricity prices are low, if my water usage is high or my electricity usage is low.
- password4321 1y ago
  I would like to know how much water is taken by a datacenter vs. the same size space of apartments. I can see why it could be considered a bad choice for communities long term if a datacenter takes more.
  - jeffbee 1y ago
    Some quick napkin math using averages (data center designs vary). One of Google's larger and thirstier data centers, in Oklahoma, is said to use 833 million gallons per year (that's about 2500 acre-feet, in useful terms). It occupies about 250 acres, most of which looks to be parking lots but whatever. The number of households that can be supported on 1 acre-foot per year ranges from 2 to 6 depending (Las Vegas on one end, San Francisco on the other). You said apartments specifically and this urban form usually starts at 50 dwellings per acre, minimum, which would lead me to say the apartments use more water. The break-even point in this equation is 2-5 households per acre.
  - NegativeLatency 1y ago
    Apples and oranges, you can compare the water usage, but places for people to live aren't in the same category as datacenters.
rawgabbit 1y ago
It said 41% of the water used in the US is for thermo electric cooling. Albeit, it didn't break this down into saltwater vs freshwater. It also said the vast majority of this water usage is due to older plants that did not recirculate the water. The newer plants that recirculate the water only used a tiny fraction of water in comparison. So...if the US replaces all of its old nuclear power plants, we would free up almost 40% of water used today?
- gpm 1y ago
  How did you go from "thermoelectric" to "nuclear"? The US has nearly as much coal power as nuclear power, and significantly more natural gas than nuclear.
  - rawgabbit 1y ago
    I assumed only nuclear power plants need that much water for cooling. It is only an assumption. If I am wrong I am happy to be corrected.
    - gpm 1y ago
      I don't have numbers to quote at you, but I would assume not. Fundamentally coal, nuclear, and gas-boiler (but not gas-turbine) power plants work the same way - you heat up water until it boils, and run the steam through a turbine to turn that heat into mechanical energy. I.e. the "cooling" is also the electricity generation mechanism. As a result same amount of heat should result in the basically same amount of electricity for each process, and since the water is being used in the same way they should be pretty much equal in water (use or consumption)/electricity output efficiency assuming they were built with the same era of technology...
      - rawgabbit 1y ago
        I was mentally referring to this article. It mentioned that natural gas plants only used one tenth that of coal. I assumed this is because natural gas plants are newer etc. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50698 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50698 Natural gas-fired generation uses a more energy-efficient technology to produce electricity than coal and has a lower water withdrawal intensity than coal. Natural gas combined-cycle generation had an average water withdrawal intensity of 2,793 gal/MWh in 2020, compared with 21,406 gal/MWh for coal.
lxe 1y ago
> Average per-capita domestic water use in the US is 82 gallons per day. By comparison, German homes use around 33 gallons per person per day, UK homes use around 37 gallons, and French homes use around 39 gallons. I want to know way more information about these figures... like, are there significant outliers? Drastically different usage profiles?
- widforss 1y ago
  I recently looked up whether it would be worth it to me to install a water meter instead of paying a flat-rate. Apparently the flat rate is calculated on a consumption of avout half a cubic meter per day. But, without a water meter, I can only guess if my consumption is more or less than that. My guess is that it's considerably less though.
  - dlcarrier 1y ago
    I live in California, where half of the state is a desert half is a rainforest. The politicians here like to think that everyone lives in urban desert cities built on fault lines next to pyrophytic forests, so our regulations assume that every household needs earthquake proofing, fire proofing, thick insulation, and major urban planning. I live in an area where pretty much non of those things matter, but one of the regulations that stands out the most is that the water everywhere has to be metered, even though the reserviour near me regularly has to be drained, because it's to full to make it through the wet season. My water districts solution was to set the price per unit of water at cost, so I pay $40/mo for insfrastructure, and a dollar or two for water. If I quadrupled my water consumption, I wouldn't even notice the price change. I actually pay more to service the meters than I pay for water.
- dfxm12 1y ago
  Maybe there are regs on appliances in Europe, or maybe the prices are high enough that the market demands efficient appliances (like gas/petrol). Whenever I stay in an airbnb in europe, whether it is a fancy place or a cheap apartment, all the appliances look similarly small and water efficient. The washing machine, flushing, hot water heaters, etc. can all add up. To wit, there is no uniform water efficiency requirements in the US.
xyst 1y ago
With the rise in climate change and _collective inaction_. We are in a trajectory for mass extinction [1]. With the second AI gold rush coming to a near abrupt stop, political climates worsening, billionaires continuing to loot the collective populace through their pawns in the kakistocracy (USA) and kleptocracy (Russia). We are absolutely cooked. What’s the point anymore? What are we even solving? Being a _good_ person is no longer worth any value. Just exploit and climb over each other like crabs in barrel. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/09/19/earth-temperature-global-warming-planet/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/09/1...
- cyrnel 1y ago
  It's true that we were all sold the lie of individual actions being the way to solve the climate crisis (recycling, turning off lights, etc.) But I think the conclusion is to try other strategies rather than giving up when the first strategy didn't work.
- xienze 1y ago
  > We are in a trajectory for mass extinction Birth rates are below replacement nearly everywhere. That’s going to cause extinction far sooner than climate change will.
scythe 1y ago
Potter's analysis of the various consumptive uses of water relies on the USGS survey data of the uses of water, generally a good source. However, there is a small flaw when we try to turn consumptive use into consumption, which is alluded to but not quantified in the USGS report: water losses to evaporation during storage (in reservoirs) and transportation. This is discussed in e.g.: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/99/1/bams-d-15-00224.1.xml https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/99/1/bams-d-... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0034425719301063 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00344... (translation: 33.73e9 m^3/yr ≈ 24400 Mgal/day, roughly corn + alfalfa + steel) Much of the literature is preliminary and recommends further study, but the initial estimates indicate that the amount of water that is simply lost from reservoirs is surprisingly large. So I like to yak about covering reservoirs (possibly with solar panels), which won't solve everything, but it has a far larger impact than data centers. Aside: metric, please!
ihaveajob 1y ago
Interesting article, but those cumulative maps are... not so useful. They're straight up from https://www.reddit.com/r/xkcd/comments/13nm1o/heatmap/ https://www.reddit.com/r/xkcd/comments/13nm1o/heatmap/
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eweise 1y ago
"The US has around 16,000 golf courses, and collectively they use about a billion gallons of water a day, or around 0.3% of total US water use." I say that's a darn good use of water. Fore!
arp242 1y ago
> We can also think about it in economic terms. The 2.5 billion gallons per day required to grow cotton in the US created about six billion pounds of cotton in 2023, worth around $4.5 billion. Data centers, by contrast, are critical infrastructure for technology companies worth many trillions of dollars. Anthropic alone, just one of many AI companies, is already making $5 billion dollars every year selling access to its AI model. A gallon of water used to cool a data center is creating thousands of times more value than if that gallon were used to water a cotton plant. Clothing is a basic human need, whereas data centres or AI are, well, not. To reduce this to purely "economical value" is bizarre. This is "only madmen and economists believe in infinite growth" type stuff. As for the rest, one of the concerns is that it adds demand to an already stressed system that struggle to meet the other needs – many of which are far more critical – especially during droughts. The proverbial straw that overflowed the bucket, so to speak. Stuff like "it's 6% of the water used by US golf courses" is far too broad because in some areas there are no water shortage problems and in others there are.
- xienze 1y ago
  > A gallon of water used to cool a data center is creating thousands of times more value than if that gallon were used to water a cotton plant. This completely neglects that the cotton is sold for a profit and Anthropic is doing the equivalent of selling $6B for $5B. Looking at it that way, the water used to grow cotton is producing a lot more value.
- dexterdog 1y ago
  The water that cools the datacenter is one minor ingredient in the process. For the cotton plant it is one of the few, critical ingredients.
  - Aperocky 1y ago
    How is it a minor ingredient if the data center will not work without it? No datacenter can operate normally without a cooling system.
    - 1y ago
js2 1y ago
I was curious about the "US Thermal Power Plant Water Use By County" graph which has a very dark square in the SE corner of NC. It's Brunswick County. I guess it's due to the Brunswick Nuclear Generating Station: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunswick_Nuclear_Generating_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunswick_Nuclear_Generating_S... The water supply in Brunswick County is terribly polluted by PFAS (courtesy of DuPont, not the power plant): https://www.nrdc.org/stories/drinking-water-crisis-north-carolina-ignored https://www.nrdc.org/stories/drinking-water-crisis-north-car...
dbuxton 1y ago
Interesting that the infographic (which I thought was exceptionally well-designed, well done USGS) found it necessary to call out that 0 billion gallons/day goes to Mexico. Was this done by previous or this administration I wonder? I do recall reading something about disputes between US and Mexico over abstraction. (Presumably from Rio Grande or similar).
- hvb2 1y ago
  It might be because there used to be a significant flow from the Colorado river into Mexico. But we extract so much that that's gone dry before it reaches the border. Also, it might be just to show that the other landmass neighboring is not getting anything.
jillesvangurp 1y ago
I'm from the Netherlands. The last few years there have been issues with ground water levels dropping and a lack of rainfall. To the point where water companies are asking consumers to reduce their water use for e.g. irrigating their gardens, shower less long, etc. Of course, the notion of a water shortage in a country where two of the largest rivers in Europe empty in the North Sea and that keeps about a third of it's land that lies below sea levels dry by actively pumping relatively clean water out is a bit of a weird notion to sell. We have a surplus of water, not a shortage. Rivers overflowing their dikes is an issue we deal with regularly. And a lot of infrastructure to dump that into the North Sea by the millions of liters per day. The issue isn't that there isn't more clean water than we can handle but that more water gets taken from limited ground water reserves than is added back naturally. This would be a non-issue if we'd mostly use surface water instead. Most of this ground water isn't even used by consumers but by agriculture. And worse, farmers also work very hard to keep their land dry after irrigating it because they need the ground to be moist, not soaking wet as in a swamp. The water that they drain is very high in nutrients because they are using a lot of fertilizer too. So, basically, agriculture is in the business of taking rain water that dumps on their land and surrounding lands and basically dumping it into rivers without even using it for irrigation. But then when it doesn't rain, they use ground water to irrigate, which then drains into rivers. As a result, nature is suffering because ground water levels are dropping and because surface water is polluted. Ground water is also used for consumers. The solution is of course to use slightly more expensive to use water from e.g. surface water or rain water (which is generally drained to get rid of it ASAP). Of course a lot of that water isn't as easy to access everywhere so it requires infrastructure (pipes) or storage (reservoirs). But historically, ground water was there and relatively clean (so it can be used without much processing) and people just use it without thinking about it. Most people with gardens don't even capture the water that falls on their roofs, which on an annual basis should be plenty to water their gardens. Neither are they (re)using grey water or rain water for e.g. flushing their toilets. All of that is done using tap water that comes from ground water. This isn't a shortage crisis but a water abuse crisis. The solution is being a bit smarter about what water we use for which purpose. And a lot of that is rethinking intensive agriculture. We grow crops to feed cattle that produces so much manure that we have severe nitrogen pollution getting in the way of economic growth because we have to limit construction in/near polluted areas. Those crops uses ground water and feed the cattle. The problems are connected.
renewiltord 1y ago
The whole debate is retarded and only real because we try to shut down our power plants so we can’t have large scale desalination. When I was younger I hoped that all these degrowthers would just age out. But it turns out young people keep filling in the ranks. The interesting thing is watching as they all complain about the consequences of stifling growth without realizing that’s what’s happening. “I don’t want any more housing here. It’s too expensive” Totally retarded but fortunately I’ve figured out my way around this stuff.
MeteorMarc 1y ago
Can anybody explain why water used by data centers is considered as disappeared/consumed? Isnt it possible to reuse it for irrigation?
- matt_kantor 1y ago
  TFA says: > Per Lawrence Berkeley Lab[1], in 2023, data centers used around 48 million gallons of water a day directly for cooling. Most of this water will evaporate as part of the cooling process[2], and is thus consumed. [1]: https://eta-publications.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/lbnl-2024-united-states-data-center-energy-usage-report.pdf?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email https://eta-publications.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12... [2]: https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/04/how_datacenters_use_water/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/04/how_datacenters_use_w...
aidenn0 1y ago
I'm somewhat astonished at the per-capita household use of water per day. I assume it must mostly be for watering lawns? We have a swimming pool that leaks (we were quoted $125k to fix it since the deck will need replacing, and with interest rates being what they are, borrowing to fix it would be rather painful), and we use only 51gal/person/day at our home. I estimate that if fixing the pool would save another 10.
- hearsathought 1y ago
  > I'm somewhat astonished at the per-capita household use of water per day. I assume it must mostly be for watering lawns? I'd assume so. Would be interesting to see the water usage comparison between city dwellers and suburbanites.
- morleytj 1y ago
  Lawns use such an incredible amount of water, particularly people maintaining them in deserts, like in Arizona and parts of California. It boggles my mind that people go out of their way to put so much effort and resources just into having grass in front of their house that they mostly don't use.
  - rconti 1y ago
    Honestly, if you're maintaining a lawn in places that don't get year-round rain, you need to water it. I grew up in Seattle and it never occurred to me that there were places where you didn't need to water a lawn.
    - nucleardog 1y ago
      > Honestly, if you're maintaining a lawn in places that don't get year-round rain, you need to water it. Only if you want to grow non-native species and always have it looking like a magazine cover. My house is sitting in a five acre clearing covered in whatever flora decides to grow there, with minimal "curation" (tend to avoid cutting beautiful native flowers to encourage them to spread, do try and deal with removing things like poison ivy). When it rains, everything greens up, grows quickly, needs lots of mowing. If it doesn't rain for a few weeks while the sun cooks it, some things will go a bit brown and lifeless. Then the next rain comes and it all perks right back up. When winter comes, it all sits under the snow for months and months and when the snow melts it picks right back up where it left off. Most of these plants were here before we were and they'll be here after. They don't need my help.

241 points by juliangamble 1y ago

> Water in the US is generally both widely available and inexpensive: my monthly water bill is roughly 5% of the cost of my monthly electricity bill, and the service is far more reliable. In my experience with municipal utility districts, the reliability of the water supply is typically not much better than the local power grid. The sewage lift stations seem to have the highest quality generator arrangements.

bcrosby95 1y ago
Really? I've never turned my tap and and not had water come out. But we get several power outages per year.
- password4321 1y ago
  Water infrastructure outages are typically due to failures needing repairs (relevant to this discussion: water main breaks which lead to boil water advisories). Few municipalities are fiscally responsible enough to invest in all the preventative maintenance required to completely avoid failures across all types of infrastructure (a low-priority budget item when things are working smoothly), but it also takes decades for water mains to fail.
thanhhaimai 1y ago
It's interesting you said that. My experience is the opposite. In my last 10 years in California, I've had power outages a couple times a year (mostly due to storm / trees falling on the electrical lines). But I don't recall a time I got water cut off.
Aurornis 1y ago
> In my experience with municipal utility districts, the reliability of the water supply is typically not much better than the local power grid. Both of these services have been phenomenally reliable everywhere I’ve lived in the United States. The only exception was in a town where we’d get ice storms once a year that would bring trees down on top of power lines, but it was shocking how quickly a truck would show up and fix them all. I can’t actually think of a time my water has stopped working anywhere except once when the road was torn up and pipes had to be replaced. I wasn’t home, we just got letters explaining when it would happen and how to flush the pipes when it was done.
- cogman10 1y ago
  In the small town I lived in, we'd pretty frequently get water boiling notifications with our old water tower. Once that was replaced we never got a water boiling notice.
- dlcarrier 1y ago
  At least from what I've seen in my area, interruptions in water service don't result in a lack of pressure or flow, they result in contamination, and the water districts have to issue boil water orders. It's not a problem you would notice, and if you don't pay attention to local news, you might just end up drinking contaminated water.
evantbyrne 1y ago
Where do you live? I don't think I've ever lost water without a power outage.
- rconti 1y ago
  I've never lost water, period, and I've had multi-day power outages.
Goronmon 1y ago
Water in the US is generally both widely available and inexpensive: my monthly water bill is roughly 5% of the cost of my monthly electricity bill, and the service is far more reliable. Is this the norm for most places in the US? Where I live our water/sewer bill averages out to a little over $100 a month.

recallingmemory 1y ago

Vox did a great video visualizing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0gN1x6sVTc&ab_channel=Vox https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0gN1x6sVTc&ab_channel=Vox

TMWNN 1y ago

I recently learned that Las Vegas recycles 100% of its drinking water.

adrr 1y ago
Orange County California does the same. Injects treated wastewater back into the aquifer. Largest toilet to tap system in the world.
- rufus_foreman 1y ago
  "Toilet to Tap" would be a great name for a California brewpub.
  - rconti 1y ago
    My local brewery made a beer out of recycled water. It's not legal to sell, though. https://www.devilscanyon.com/epic-onewater-brew.html https://www.devilscanyon.com/epic-onewater-brew.html
drewg123 1y ago
I guess that explains why the water there tastes so nasty. The only places in the US that I ever seek out bottled water are Las Vegas and Phoenix. The water in both places tastes nasty and often comes out of the tap very warm..

jackconsidine 1y ago

> The closest thing the federal government has to a department of water infrastructure, the Bureau of Reclamation, has an annual budget of just $1.1 billion. One of my favorite books is Cadillac Desert. It's about the damming of the US rivers, the water crisis, and the history of the Bureau. It may be dwarfed by the other departments, but its had a massive impact on US population development especially in LA. > From 1902 to 1905, Eaton, Mulholland, and others engaged in underhanded methods to ensure that Los Angeles would gain the water rights in the Owens Valley, blocking the Bureau of Reclamation from building water infrastructure for the residents in Owens Valley.[12]: 48–69 [16]: 62–69 While Eaton engaged in most of the political maneuverings and chicanery,[16]: 62 Mulholland misled Los Angeles public opinion by dramatically understating the amount of water then available for Los Angeles' growth.[16]: 73 Mulholland also misled residents of the Owens Valley; he indicated that Los Angeles would only use unused flows in the Owens Valley, while planning on using the full water rights to fill the aquifer of the San Fernando Valley. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Mulholland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Mulholland This is the Mulholland of Mulholland Drive who was a major character in CD

blackguardx 1y ago
For many years, they piped the entirety of the Owens River to LA, over a hundred miles away and over a mountain range. It is wild that the follies of Los Angeles water management has led to permanent scars in the east side of California from Mono Lake to the Salton Sea disaster.

jeffbee 1y ago

What a great article. Definitely bookmarking this for reference. People who oppose housing construction often invoke "but what about the water??" as their argument, while the fact is that California cities use less water per capita and overall than they did 50 years ago, almost entirely because of better toilets. The last couple of charts really highlight that trend. Something else worth considering is that many uses at least in California are non-rivalrous. Reducing one water use does not necessarily create free supply of water for some other use, since water is a physical good that must be transported, refined, stored, and delivered. The best example of this is flood irrigation for rice in northern California. Bad optics, perhaps, but the fact is the rice is grown there because it was flooded in the first place. You can stop growing rice, and that will change one of the cells in your spreadsheet, but only because the spreadsheet model isn't quite right. You can also stop feeding cattle entirely and that isn't going to help cities with chronic supply problems, like Santa Barbara, nor will it benefit large urban systems like San Francisco and EBMUD who rely on dedicated alpine supplies.

ryandrake 1y ago
> People who oppose housing construction often invoke "but what about the water??" as their argument, while the fact is that California cities use less water per capita and overall than they did 50 years ago, almost entirely because of better toilets. Those people aren't talking about water use, but all the infrastructure around water. If you take a plot of land that used to be occupied by a couple of single family homes and want to build a multi-story apartment building on it, you need bigger, stronger water supply infrastructure to support all those new sinks. You need bigger, stronger sewage infrastructure to support all the new drains and toilets. Not to mention better electrical infra, different garbage disposal infra, and so on. While I'm generally supportive of "moar housing" you can't just plop the housing down and say job done. You need more of everything else peripheral to and supporting that housing.
- jeffbee 1y ago
  You, like them, are wrong, for reasons that I already explained. These urban systems were designed to deliver and were in fact delivering more water 50 years ago than they do currently. Much more. They are underutilized! Building the apartments only takes them marginally up in the direction of their design capacity.

newfocogi 1y ago

I found a lot of value in this article. Out of frustration with people who are alarmist over how much water a datacenter "consumes" compared to households, I've probably erred too often towards: 'People sometimes invoke the idea that water moves through a cycle and never really gets destroyed, in order to suggest that we don’t need to be concerned at all about water use. But while water may not get destroyed, it can get “used up” in the sense that it becomes infeasible or uneconomic to access it.' Side note, this personal anecdote from the author caught me off guard: "my monthly water bill is roughly 5% of the cost of my monthly electricity bill". I'm in the American southwest (but not arid desert like parts of Arizona/Nevada/Utah), and my monthly water cost averages out annually to ~60% of the cost of electricity. Makes me wonder if my water prices are high, if my electricity prices are low, if my water usage is high or my electricity usage is low.

password4321 1y ago
I would like to know how much water is taken by a datacenter vs. the same size space of apartments. I can see why it could be considered a bad choice for communities long term if a datacenter takes more.
- jeffbee 1y ago
  Some quick napkin math using averages (data center designs vary). One of Google's larger and thirstier data centers, in Oklahoma, is said to use 833 million gallons per year (that's about 2500 acre-feet, in useful terms). It occupies about 250 acres, most of which looks to be parking lots but whatever. The number of households that can be supported on 1 acre-foot per year ranges from 2 to 6 depending (Las Vegas on one end, San Francisco on the other). You said apartments specifically and this urban form usually starts at 50 dwellings per acre, minimum, which would lead me to say the apartments use more water. The break-even point in this equation is 2-5 households per acre.
- NegativeLatency 1y ago
  Apples and oranges, you can compare the water usage, but places for people to live aren't in the same category as datacenters.

rawgabbit 1y ago

It said 41% of the water used in the US is for thermo electric cooling. Albeit, it didn't break this down into saltwater vs freshwater. It also said the vast majority of this water usage is due to older plants that did not recirculate the water. The newer plants that recirculate the water only used a tiny fraction of water in comparison. So...if the US replaces all of its old nuclear power plants, we would free up almost 40% of water used today?

gpm 1y ago
How did you go from "thermoelectric" to "nuclear"? The US has nearly as much coal power as nuclear power, and significantly more natural gas than nuclear.
- rawgabbit 1y ago
  I assumed only nuclear power plants need that much water for cooling. It is only an assumption. If I am wrong I am happy to be corrected.
  - gpm 1y ago
    I don't have numbers to quote at you, but I would assume not. Fundamentally coal, nuclear, and gas-boiler (but not gas-turbine) power plants work the same way - you heat up water until it boils, and run the steam through a turbine to turn that heat into mechanical energy. I.e. the "cooling" is also the electricity generation mechanism. As a result same amount of heat should result in the basically same amount of electricity for each process, and since the water is being used in the same way they should be pretty much equal in water (use or consumption)/electricity output efficiency assuming they were built with the same era of technology...
    - rawgabbit 1y ago
      I was mentally referring to this article. It mentioned that natural gas plants only used one tenth that of coal. I assumed this is because natural gas plants are newer etc. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50698 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50698 Natural gas-fired generation uses a more energy-efficient technology to produce electricity than coal and has a lower water withdrawal intensity than coal. Natural gas combined-cycle generation had an average water withdrawal intensity of 2,793 gal/MWh in 2020, compared with 21,406 gal/MWh for coal.

lxe 1y ago

> Average per-capita domestic water use in the US is 82 gallons per day. By comparison, German homes use around 33 gallons per person per day, UK homes use around 37 gallons, and French homes use around 39 gallons. I want to know way more information about these figures... like, are there significant outliers? Drastically different usage profiles?

widforss 1y ago
I recently looked up whether it would be worth it to me to install a water meter instead of paying a flat-rate. Apparently the flat rate is calculated on a consumption of avout half a cubic meter per day. But, without a water meter, I can only guess if my consumption is more or less than that. My guess is that it's considerably less though.
- dlcarrier 1y ago
  I live in California, where half of the state is a desert half is a rainforest. The politicians here like to think that everyone lives in urban desert cities built on fault lines next to pyrophytic forests, so our regulations assume that every household needs earthquake proofing, fire proofing, thick insulation, and major urban planning. I live in an area where pretty much non of those things matter, but one of the regulations that stands out the most is that the water everywhere has to be metered, even though the reserviour near me regularly has to be drained, because it's to full to make it through the wet season. My water districts solution was to set the price per unit of water at cost, so I pay $40/mo for insfrastructure, and a dollar or two for water. If I quadrupled my water consumption, I wouldn't even notice the price change. I actually pay more to service the meters than I pay for water.
dfxm12 1y ago
Maybe there are regs on appliances in Europe, or maybe the prices are high enough that the market demands efficient appliances (like gas/petrol). Whenever I stay in an airbnb in europe, whether it is a fancy place or a cheap apartment, all the appliances look similarly small and water efficient. The washing machine, flushing, hot water heaters, etc. can all add up. To wit, there is no uniform water efficiency requirements in the US.

xyst 1y ago

With the rise in climate change and _collective inaction_. We are in a trajectory for mass extinction [1]. With the second AI gold rush coming to a near abrupt stop, political climates worsening, billionaires continuing to loot the collective populace through their pawns in the kakistocracy (USA) and kleptocracy (Russia). We are absolutely cooked. What’s the point anymore? What are we even solving? Being a _good_ person is no longer worth any value. Just exploit and climb over each other like crabs in barrel. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/09/19/earth-temperature-global-warming-planet/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/09/1...

cyrnel 1y ago
It's true that we were all sold the lie of individual actions being the way to solve the climate crisis (recycling, turning off lights, etc.) But I think the conclusion is to try other strategies rather than giving up when the first strategy didn't work.
xienze 1y ago
> We are in a trajectory for mass extinction Birth rates are below replacement nearly everywhere. That’s going to cause extinction far sooner than climate change will.

scythe 1y ago

Potter's analysis of the various consumptive uses of water relies on the USGS survey data of the uses of water, generally a good source. However, there is a small flaw when we try to turn consumptive use into consumption, which is alluded to but not quantified in the USGS report: water losses to evaporation during storage (in reservoirs) and transportation. This is discussed in e.g.: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/99/1/bams-d-15-00224.1.xml https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/99/1/bams-d-... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0034425719301063 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00344... (translation: 33.73e9 m^3/yr ≈ 24400 Mgal/day, roughly corn + alfalfa + steel) Much of the literature is preliminary and recommends further study, but the initial estimates indicate that the amount of water that is simply lost from reservoirs is surprisingly large. So I like to yak about covering reservoirs (possibly with solar panels), which won't solve everything, but it has a far larger impact than data centers. Aside: metric, please!

ihaveajob 1y ago

Interesting article, but those cumulative maps are... not so useful. They're straight up from https://www.reddit.com/r/xkcd/comments/13nm1o/heatmap/ https://www.reddit.com/r/xkcd/comments/13nm1o/heatmap/

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eweise 1y ago

"The US has around 16,000 golf courses, and collectively they use about a billion gallons of water a day, or around 0.3% of total US water use." I say that's a darn good use of water. Fore!

arp242 1y ago

> We can also think about it in economic terms. The 2.5 billion gallons per day required to grow cotton in the US created about six billion pounds of cotton in 2023, worth around $4.5 billion. Data centers, by contrast, are critical infrastructure for technology companies worth many trillions of dollars. Anthropic alone, just one of many AI companies, is already making $5 billion dollars every year selling access to its AI model. A gallon of water used to cool a data center is creating thousands of times more value than if that gallon were used to water a cotton plant. Clothing is a basic human need, whereas data centres or AI are, well, not. To reduce this to purely "economical value" is bizarre. This is "only madmen and economists believe in infinite growth" type stuff. As for the rest, one of the concerns is that it adds demand to an already stressed system that struggle to meet the other needs – many of which are far more critical – especially during droughts. The proverbial straw that overflowed the bucket, so to speak. Stuff like "it's 6% of the water used by US golf courses" is far too broad because in some areas there are no water shortage problems and in others there are.

xienze 1y ago
> A gallon of water used to cool a data center is creating thousands of times more value than if that gallon were used to water a cotton plant. This completely neglects that the cotton is sold for a profit and Anthropic is doing the equivalent of selling $6B for $5B. Looking at it that way, the water used to grow cotton is producing a lot more value.
dexterdog 1y ago
The water that cools the datacenter is one minor ingredient in the process. For the cotton plant it is one of the few, critical ingredients.
- Aperocky 1y ago
  How is it a minor ingredient if the data center will not work without it? No datacenter can operate normally without a cooling system.
  - 1y ago

js2 1y ago

I was curious about the "US Thermal Power Plant Water Use By County" graph which has a very dark square in the SE corner of NC. It's Brunswick County. I guess it's due to the Brunswick Nuclear Generating Station: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunswick_Nuclear_Generating_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunswick_Nuclear_Generating_S... The water supply in Brunswick County is terribly polluted by PFAS (courtesy of DuPont, not the power plant): https://www.nrdc.org/stories/drinking-water-crisis-north-carolina-ignored https://www.nrdc.org/stories/drinking-water-crisis-north-car...

dbuxton 1y ago

Interesting that the infographic (which I thought was exceptionally well-designed, well done USGS) found it necessary to call out that 0 billion gallons/day goes to Mexico. Was this done by previous or this administration I wonder? I do recall reading something about disputes between US and Mexico over abstraction. (Presumably from Rio Grande or similar).

hvb2 1y ago
It might be because there used to be a significant flow from the Colorado river into Mexico. But we extract so much that that's gone dry before it reaches the border. Also, it might be just to show that the other landmass neighboring is not getting anything.

jillesvangurp 1y ago

I'm from the Netherlands. The last few years there have been issues with ground water levels dropping and a lack of rainfall. To the point where water companies are asking consumers to reduce their water use for e.g. irrigating their gardens, shower less long, etc. Of course, the notion of a water shortage in a country where two of the largest rivers in Europe empty in the North Sea and that keeps about a third of it's land that lies below sea levels dry by actively pumping relatively clean water out is a bit of a weird notion to sell. We have a surplus of water, not a shortage. Rivers overflowing their dikes is an issue we deal with regularly. And a lot of infrastructure to dump that into the North Sea by the millions of liters per day. The issue isn't that there isn't more clean water than we can handle but that more water gets taken from limited ground water reserves than is added back naturally. This would be a non-issue if we'd mostly use surface water instead. Most of this ground water isn't even used by consumers but by agriculture. And worse, farmers also work very hard to keep their land dry after irrigating it because they need the ground to be moist, not soaking wet as in a swamp. The water that they drain is very high in nutrients because they are using a lot of fertilizer too. So, basically, agriculture is in the business of taking rain water that dumps on their land and surrounding lands and basically dumping it into rivers without even using it for irrigation. But then when it doesn't rain, they use ground water to irrigate, which then drains into rivers. As a result, nature is suffering because ground water levels are dropping and because surface water is polluted. Ground water is also used for consumers. The solution is of course to use slightly more expensive to use water from e.g. surface water or rain water (which is generally drained to get rid of it ASAP). Of course a lot of that water isn't as easy to access everywhere so it requires infrastructure (pipes) or storage (reservoirs). But historically, ground water was there and relatively clean (so it can be used without much processing) and people just use it without thinking about it. Most people with gardens don't even capture the water that falls on their roofs, which on an annual basis should be plenty to water their gardens. Neither are they (re)using grey water or rain water for e.g. flushing their toilets. All of that is done using tap water that comes from ground water. This isn't a shortage crisis but a water abuse crisis. The solution is being a bit smarter about what water we use for which purpose. And a lot of that is rethinking intensive agriculture. We grow crops to feed cattle that produces so much manure that we have severe nitrogen pollution getting in the way of economic growth because we have to limit construction in/near polluted areas. Those crops uses ground water and feed the cattle. The problems are connected.

renewiltord 1y ago

The whole debate is retarded and only real because we try to shut down our power plants so we can’t have large scale desalination. When I was younger I hoped that all these degrowthers would just age out. But it turns out young people keep filling in the ranks. The interesting thing is watching as they all complain about the consequences of stifling growth without realizing that’s what’s happening. “I don’t want any more housing here. It’s too expensive” Totally retarded but fortunately I’ve figured out my way around this stuff.

MeteorMarc 1y ago

Can anybody explain why water used by data centers is considered as disappeared/consumed? Isnt it possible to reuse it for irrigation?

matt_kantor 1y ago
TFA says: > Per Lawrence Berkeley Lab[1], in 2023, data centers used around 48 million gallons of water a day directly for cooling. Most of this water will evaporate as part of the cooling process[2], and is thus consumed. [1]: https://eta-publications.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/lbnl-2024-united-states-data-center-energy-usage-report.pdf?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email https://eta-publications.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12... [2]: https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/04/how_datacenters_use_water/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/04/how_datacenters_use_w...

aidenn0 1y ago

I'm somewhat astonished at the per-capita household use of water per day. I assume it must mostly be for watering lawns? We have a swimming pool that leaks (we were quoted $125k to fix it since the deck will need replacing, and with interest rates being what they are, borrowing to fix it would be rather painful), and we use only 51gal/person/day at our home. I estimate that if fixing the pool would save another 10.

hearsathought 1y ago
> I'm somewhat astonished at the per-capita household use of water per day. I assume it must mostly be for watering lawns? I'd assume so. Would be interesting to see the water usage comparison between city dwellers and suburbanites.
morleytj 1y ago
Lawns use such an incredible amount of water, particularly people maintaining them in deserts, like in Arizona and parts of California. It boggles my mind that people go out of their way to put so much effort and resources just into having grass in front of their house that they mostly don't use.
- rconti 1y ago
  Honestly, if you're maintaining a lawn in places that don't get year-round rain, you need to water it. I grew up in Seattle and it never occurred to me that there were places where you didn't need to water a lawn.
  - nucleardog 1y ago
    > Honestly, if you're maintaining a lawn in places that don't get year-round rain, you need to water it. Only if you want to grow non-native species and always have it looking like a magazine cover. My house is sitting in a five acre clearing covered in whatever flora decides to grow there, with minimal "curation" (tend to avoid cutting beautiful native flowers to encourage them to spread, do try and deal with removing things like poison ivy). When it rains, everything greens up, grows quickly, needs lots of mowing. If it doesn't rain for a few weeks while the sun cooks it, some things will go a bit brown and lifeless. Then the next rain comes and it all perks right back up. When winter comes, it all sits under the snow for months and months and when the snow melts it picks right back up where it left off. Most of these plants were here before we were and they'll be here after. They don't need my help.