Yes, clearly it should be the other way round; people should be drinking clean water and Google should use their waste water for cooling.

I'm not sure but I'm guessing gray water (or treated waste water) is not suitable for cooling purposes? Particle charge in small pipes and scaling may be a problem. Also, collecting gray water or channeling treated waste water - depending on the location that might be a problem.

Not that I'm in favor of using drinking water for cooling slop factories, but I guess the reason we don't see waste water being used for cooling is cost (unless governments start mandating that...)

There are multiple ways. Closed loops, well not big deal you fill up and there is slight evaporation losses, but you could ship that in in tanker truck maybe once every few years.

Next is open loop cooling using secondary loop. Take a river, lake or sea. Pump some water from it, pass through heat exchanger and pump back out. Manageable for most of the year. Worse version is pump ground water and return it to these. Depletes the ground water...

And finally evaporative cooling. Which is boiling, but not at boiling point. Water goes to sky. No immediate return to local ground water or downstream the river... In this case you actually do in sense use up the water. Kinda like burning fossil fuels returns co2 to atmosphere. It will later turn to biomass, but that is a separate cycle.

It's not a stupid question but: technically, after passing through Google's facility that is now gray water, and you can't use that for agriculture or any other 'common usage' without a whole raft of work and you can't just dump it into the aquifer either.

> it comes out of the datacenter just a little warmer

Exact values matter. Some power plants had been found dumping +10 C water into lakes/rivers, while they had permit only for +5, and it totally destroyed local ecosystem. And most efficient (in terms of money) is evaporation cooling, where at least part of water is "lost".

A lot of it gets converted to water vapor in the evaporative coolers, so it doesn't flow out -- it becomes humidity or clouds. The coolers do also produce waste water, but with all the minerals left behind after evaporation it's not suitable for drinking.

I don't think that will happen. Being utility is hard and margins are not great unless you get some government money like credit. And even those might go away with change in regime.

There just isn't enough margin or "free money" for someone like Google.

Cue the White Knights defending the poor misunderstood megacorp from their keyboards.

>I just assume by default

Gitmo couldn't get me to admit to this degree of intellectual cowardice

It's so refreshing to see someone fully disclose their ignorance in a comment, rather than pretend they're arguing in good faith.

This comment made me curious is such a thing actually happens.

As it turns out "greenmailing" is a thing, but not from environmental groups. Here's what claude found for me:

<ai> The concern isn't baseless—there are documented cases of parties using environmental law as leverage, particularly California's CEQA. But empirical studies show only ~13% of such lawsuits actually come from environmental groups; the majority come from labor unions, business competitors, and NIMBYs hijacking environmental review for unrelated purposes. In this specific case, WaterWatch has a 40-year track record on Oregon water issues and the concerns about fish habitat are supported by the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs—so the 'thinly veiled shakedown' framing doesn't really fit </ai>

I hope doing that research didn't spend too much water!

Do you still work for Google?

Spoken like someone who hasn't interacted with the real world in quite some time. There are plenty of third world countries you can have a look at to see how it's going without those pesky rules.