Environmentalists worry Google behind bid to control Oregon town's water

156 pointsposted 13 days ago
by voxadam
(sfgate.com)

88 Comments

netdevphoenix

12 days ago

The amount of people here in the comments happily suggesting to let Google use the clean water for their AI datacenters and return dirty water to use in crops is a bit worrying

jongjong

12 days ago

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

bko

12 days ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't water for cooling a closed loop? The water is used to cool, presumably it becomes water vapor and is re-condensed when cooled and used again.

Either way, prices should determine what an effective use of resources should be. It signals the scarcity, allows it to flow to the most productive resources, encourages new production and sources, and provides revenue.

chimpanzee

12 days ago

> prices should determine what an effective use of resources should be

I have $1,000,000,000 and an insatiable appetite for both material and domination. My 9 neighbors, stupid naive fucks that they are, only have $100,000 in total and do not have imaginations sufficient to even begin to want all materials and power in the world.

So of course, when the sole owner of water comes along and offers to sell it, I buy it all for $100,001. I can really never have enough water, especially as I need to power wash my driveway everyday. (I absolutely cannot stand the sight of grime.)

Anyways I guess my point is, I’m glad we all understand that price determines efficiency. Once my 9 neighbors die of dehydration, I’ll be able to gather more materials and power with less obstruction and competition. Hooray!

a022311

12 days ago

Guess what people usually use to cool water vapor...

It does make sense that datacenters would be cooled just like your water-cooled PC but that's probably not very sustainable given the fact that they don't do so.

s1artibartfast

12 days ago

Ownership matters and some owners may have preferred uses independent of market price.

I might not want to sell the spare room in my house to creepy stranger, and I shouldn't have to outbid them if I already own it.

Who owns the water?

user

12 days ago

[deleted]

sznio

12 days ago

why bother with using a radiator to cool the water back down when it's cheaper to dump it/evaporate it when it's hot.

>Either way, prices should determine what an effective use of resources should be.

And with the AI frenzy, generating slop is considered way more important than people having access to water.

ciconia

12 days ago

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...)

netdevphoenix

12 days ago

I believe (happy to be corrected!) it's the same reason juice has little to no fibre: particles in the liquid could potentially clog the data centre cooling systems. But Google should just include the filtering cost as part of their operational expenses

cm2187

12 days ago

Stupid question: datacenters need water for cooling right? But they don't boil that water, ie it comes out of the datacenter just a little warmer? If that is the case does it matter to the city? The warmer water can still be used for agriculture or any other common usage.

Ekaros

12 days ago

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.

progbits

12 days ago

The CO2 cycle is problematic because of timelines. We are releasing millions of years of CO2 accumulation.

Rain is more of a location problem. The evaporated water returns as rain quickly, but maybe somewhere else, such as over ocean. And the aquifer compresses and loses water retention ability.

jacquesm

12 days ago

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.

cm2187

12 days ago

But if it just went through some heat exchangers, it's not like if it was dirty? As far as I know, nuclear power plants return the water they consume to the rivers they extracted it from.

jacquesm

12 days ago

Heat exchangers could easily contaminate the water. If they're not kept hot enough they could be breeding ground for Legionella and a whole raft of other bacteria. Clean water is science, not just a matter of bulk pumping stuff from one place to another (though that's definitely a part of it). Water treatment plants are complex and have a ton of QA on their product. You can't just run it into a factory and pretend it is the same stuff going in modulo some increase in temperature.

cm2187

12 days ago

But you are talking about drinking water. I would be surprised if they even use that for cooling. But any non human consumption use of water (like agriculture) should happily use that water, shouldn't it?

jacquesm

12 days ago

No, agriculture has fairly strict standards about the quality of the water, they can't use gray water to irrigate. Of course it will still work but depending on where you live the produce may then no longer be fit for human consumption.

You can use it for irrigating your lawn but not for vegetables, especially not if you plan on selling them. But 'light' gray water requires relatively little treatment before you can use it again, however this could still be quite expensive compared to just letting it go. I wonder if they've done any quantitative research on this that's public.

pera

12 days ago

That's very interesting, thanks! I had no idea that legionella risk was a thing for data centers. This article mentions that to avoid the risk most data centers treat the water with disinfectants which are sometimes toxic:

https://www.scaleway.com/en/blog/making-the-energy-efficienc...

jacquesm

12 days ago

They're really nasty bacteria and once in a system they are hard to get rid of because then you have to heat everything to temperatures that the system normally might never reach.

That's why central heating systems that run 'low' every now and then stoke up to 60 degrees or more on the secondary circuit for tap water.

And data centers are the perfect location, endless 35 to 45 degree water. Cooling towers are the main problem for this, another is aerosols of water that has been sitting in the sun for a while, for instance in a garden hose exposed to the sun.

schainks

12 days ago

This is America. Our toilets use _clean potable water_ to flush our shit.

Drinking water from the mains is metered, so it is observable from the business perspective. Life finds a way. Heat exchangers and datacenter plumbing absolutely breed life and put things into the water that were not there when it was pumped in.

Imagine if a datacenter used a shady supplier of pipe that used, say, lead in their alloy. Do you want that datacenter grey water going into crops?

galkk

12 days ago

Do you think that water that the water that flows from kitchen sink and water that flushes in the toilet in normal house/apartment come from different pipes in any other place of the world?

JasonADrury

12 days ago

Many homes around the world do in fact have separate drinking water taps in the kitchen.

But yes, it rarely enters the building via different pipes. I'm sure that's a thing somewhere too.

cm2187

12 days ago

The water from the lake isn't drinking water either, it is contaminated with all sort of stuff including dead animals and animals excrements. But it doesn't mean it is not suitable for agriculture.

DanielHB

12 days ago

Don't they reuse the water by cooling it outside the data center? Most power plants do that.

jacquesm

12 days ago

Yes, but that does not mean it is now clean water. Anything could happen between the moment Google ingests it and spits it back out, the assumption that it is 'just' a little warmer is nice but it misses the option of for instance contamination from a secondary circuit or various substances leaching into the water used as a coolant.

DanielHB

11 days ago

But I mean, the water is not discarded, it is constantly reused. I assume some is lost over time, but surely it is minimal?

chinathrow

12 days ago

So where toes the "not clean water" go then usually in such a setup?

jacquesm

12 days ago

Water treatment plants.

direwolf20

12 days ago

If they can return it to the river how can't it flow to agriculture?

mikestew

12 days ago

It’s gray water, and just as how I can’t dump gray water from my RV camper into the river, neither can a data center. After running through a heat exchanger there can be all kinds of crap in that water.

direwolf20

12 days ago

Data centers and power plants can and do return cooling water from a river back to the same river but warmer. What do you think is inside their heat exchangers but metal and water?

mikestew

12 days ago

What do you think is inside their heat exchangers but metal and water?

It's a bad idea to drink hot water from the tap because of the concentration of metals that accumulate in the water heater. Don't assume that a little metal in your water is perfectly safe. As for agriculture, now the metals can concentrate in your lettuce.

And, as other commenters have pointed out, what else is in there? How about Legionnaires Disease?

cm2187

12 days ago

How is that different from the metal pipes through which drinking water goes through to reach your kitchen tap, some of which are over 100 years old if you live in the UK? The contact with metal shouldn't be the problem in itself. Legionnaires disease either, the water from the river isn't drinking water to start with and the water out of the datacenter wouldn't be drinking water either.

jacquesm

12 days ago

When you start of with 'a stupid question' and people then give you lots of reasonable answers and you persist with more such questions at some point you cause me to doubt if you were really asking your first question in good faith.

cm2187

12 days ago

I apologize for not humbly submitting to the first comment on HN. If I gave the impression that you were not the ultimate authority on this topic, I certainly did not intend to do so. I should know better than to oppose common sense on a topic that is way over my head.

jacquesm

12 days ago

I'm definitely not the ultimate authority on this subject or any other but you are either interested and want to know about this or you can keep putting up objections that are masked as questions which seems to be what you are doing.

The main reason we are talking about this is because 'environmentalists' (which in itself gives a hint about the levels of expertise) are worried, they are not worried for no reason. Listing a multitude of reasons should at least make you pause about whether or not they are sincere in their concern.

The degree to which industry would wreck the environment if we let it is by now very well documented. But the EPA has been gutted and lots of safeguards have been abandoned in the name of 'progress'. This is not without risk and I am very happy that in spite of all this a lot of people are still willing to speak up and to make sure that at least the worst excesses are curbed.

You can approach this with curiosity to try to learn about the subject and to try to understand what drives the worry of people that have studied this stuff for a long time. These are not just idle musings. Or you can put up a barrage of questions effectively casting doubt on anything that might be of concern.

cm2187

12 days ago

The problem with environmentalists is that it is full of militants that aren't engineers and have very strong opinions that don't pass the most cursory smell test.

I am all open to there being problems with re-using water used to cool datacenters (hence my question). But 1) "it boils" defies common sense, no component in a computer should run at >100 degree celcius continuously, so I find it hard to believe that datacentres boil water (and I would have noticed the big cooling tower on the side of them). 2) Legionnaire disease is certainly a big deal in residential buildings with stagnant warm water, sitting in pipes sometimes for days until someone takes a shower. I fail to see how it is a major issue for a continuously flowing industrial application where the water spends very little time at elevated temperature and is continuously flowing before being released into colder water. 3) "contact with metal is bad" certainly doesn't come from someone who has seen the water supply chain in the UK or any European country with ancient infrastructures. Many of which are still made of lead. 4) "water is then not suitable for human consumption", well neither is the water in a lake. All drinking water has been filtered and sterilised. I would be surprised water used for cooling has been treated that way. So unclear to me why there would be any expectation that the water coming out of a datacenter should be any cleaner than the water coming out of a lake.

Now there is common sense, and there are regulations. The two often form a perfectly disjoint venn diagram. So I am happy to believe that there are regulations resulting in absurd situations. But from an actual risk point of view, I don't see how a datacenter "consumes" water, in any comparable way than a swimming pool, agriculture, chemical plants, or gardening, where the water cannot be used for anything else after that. To me it is more akin to a nuclear power plant, which releases water at a slightly higher temperature (despite actually boiling it), and therefore has a fairly limited impact on the water supply.

zvqcMMV6Zcr

12 days ago

> 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".

nonfamous

12 days ago

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.

MrBuddyCasino

12 days ago

More people should scrutinize the methodology behind these AI data center water usage reports.

One widely cited Berkeley Lab figure includes the water evaporated from reservoirs behind hydroelectric dams.

Excluding that factor cuts their water usage estimate by more than half.

On AI & water, looks like all US data center usage (not just AI) ranges from 628M gallons a day (counting evaporation from dam reservoirs used for hydro-power) to 200-275M with power but not dam evaporation, to 50M for cooling alone. [0]

So not nothing, but also a lot less than golf.

[0] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-dat...

jeffbee

12 days ago

Even this article mentions how ridiculous this article is. Google's gigantic data center uses a third of the water in the Dalles, a miniscule community of only 17000 people. So they are using the water of 5000 homes, i.e. nothing.

ericyd

12 days ago

It's possible to be both anti-golf, and anti-water-waste-in-tech.

MrBuddyCasino

12 days ago

[flagged]

slumberlust

12 days ago

Back to Reddit you go.

MrBuddyCasino

12 days ago

Ah yes Reddit, where all the conservatives hang out.

Even your insults are stolen from the Right because the left has zero original ideas themselves.

pjmlp

12 days ago

How far we have fallen from the "Do no evil" marketing.

DanielHB

12 days ago

I know google fiber kinda flumped, but if they are already doing their own power generation for data centers they might decide to sell that power to the public too. What is really scary is that I foresee a day where these big tech companies will see it is more profitable to serve utilities to people than web services. Then, after they have a monopoly in most areas, they will enshitify it too.

Ekaros

12 days ago

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.

direwolf20

12 days ago

This is true, to supply software you can build it once and replicate endlessly, to supply email you need to run servers. That's commoditised and the team just sees a slider controlling number of servers.

But to provide power or internet you need to dig up the roads and lay a wire to every house. It's a totally different kind of business to which a tech person is completely unaccustomed. It would be more likely for a plumber or electrician to do such a thing. It's true a tech company could buy wholesale fiber access and provide internet on top of that, like they provide email on top of wholesale servers, but that's only one part of the business.

Tech companies are struggling to even build datacenters right now because of underestimating the work involved. They're really not used to things that don't scale by themselves.

jackyinger

12 days ago

Why on earth do they want water from the national forest when the massive Columbia River is right there!? Is it too expensive to treat the river water? /s

renewiltord

12 days ago

[flagged]

kuerbel

12 days ago

Who are "these guys"? Are they the same people mentioned in the article? Why would you assume that everyone caring about the environment is the same?

If you are referring to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snail_darter_controversy

It says:

This accusation ignores the fact that the formal species description (Etnier, 1976) was thoroughly peer-reviewed before publication and has withstood decades of scrutiny—-even from biologists employed by TVA. Etnier himself acknowledged that genetic affinities between snail darters and stargazing darters would be instrumental in fully understanding their degree of relatedness and divergence (Etnier, 1976:487).

Regardless of whether snail darters are genetically distinct from stargazing darters based on current scientific data, the Little Tennessee River population in the 1970s would have nevertheless represented a population separated from the core population of stargazing darters by over 700 river miles of habitat highly modified by nearly 100 years of impoundment projects. As such, the Little Tennessee River population may still very well have qualified for protection under ESA as a sub-species or as a distinct population segment, as the ESA is applied today.

renewiltord

12 days ago

It was transparently an attempt to block the dam. Thank god Congress of that time wasn’t that convinced by the guy running dam protests suddenly finding an endangered species. The Wikipedia editor is not fully informed. These days this is the canonical example of scientific malpractice in this pseudo environmental approach.

FrostOutput

12 days ago

I hope you also take a similar view of “corporate needs”. Because their abuses of people and the environment are many.

galkk

12 days ago

Yes, corporations are not saints and stories about nestle? contracts that allow to sell them bottled glacier water boil my blood equally.

At the same time I cannot not to notice that only environmentalists, activists and watchdogs are quoted in the article. One (bark) got even quotes from 2 different people.

Not a single scientific entity, like university etc was presented.

wizzwizz4

12 days ago

Universities, in general, do not want to be seen as criticising the whales. I'm not sure whether Google or Microsoft is more lucrative, but they're both pretty big sources of low-oversight grant funding.

Peteragain

12 days ago

From a linguistics perspective "environmentalists worry" is a phrase designed to trigger a certain response. It sets up an us versus them scenario with "us" being anti environmentalists. "Concerns over" would include the reader. More interesting for the journalism for some.

tokyobreakfast

12 days ago

At this point, Google could be a drop-in replacement for the corporate villain in any 1980s/1990s action movie.

zombot

12 days ago

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

JasonADrury

12 days ago

80s and 90s films had better villains.

Has google even had a preserved fetal pig delivered to anyone?

toofy

12 days ago

for context for those who don’t know about the dead fetal pig:

a couple years ago ebay had to pay out millions to a couple it was trying to intimidate into silence, ebay didn't like the negative publicity the couples writings were generating.

ebay harassed and stalked them with tons of horrifying shit, including like mailing cockroaches, live spiders, a dead pig, a funeral wreath and a book on how to survive the death of a spouse.

it’s incredible how few people in this sphere have heard about this. the witness tampering, physical stalking, insane online harassment and on and on etc..

again, ebay was forced to pay them millions. i don’t remember all of the specifics but it was the max the law would allow and it was in the millions.

JasonADrury

12 days ago

>again, ebay was forced to pay them millions. i don’t remember all of the specifics but it was the max the law would allow and it was in the millions.

The civil trial hasn't even started yet.

toofy

12 days ago

oh, they were found guilty in criminal court and forced to pay a fine of millions [0]. i was mistaken.

their criminal fine was the max allowed at $3 million. i can’t even imagine how much they’ll have to pay out in civil after being found guilty in criminal.

unfortunately too much time has passed and i can't edit my original comment now. :(

[0] https://www.npr.org/2024/01/11/1224333712/ebay-stalking-sett...

LightBug1

12 days ago

Just wow ... can't believe I missed that ... thanks

toofy

12 days ago

yeah it’s super weird how it seems like no one has heard about this.m

the story is bonkers af. needs a movie or podcast series or something.

galkk

12 days ago

I never heard about it but the way you describe it sounds insane/sketchy, on the level of Tesla/racial slurs story with crazy millions initial verdict that ended up much lesser.

I mean, I can easily imagine mentally unstable person, that happened to be an employee, doing that shit, but I don’t see company with company processes acting like that. Like how do you expense purchasing and mailing dead pig? The life is full of surprises though, so I’m not ruling out corporate involvement completely. Can you provide sources and verdict?

toofy

12 days ago

> Can you provide sources and verdict?

sure. directly from the DOJ [0] and another from CBS. [1]

i get it, it sounds insane, but its very real. here ya go.

Department of Justice: [0]

> Jim Baugh, eBay’s former Senior Director of Safety and Security, was sentenced to 57 months in prison in September 2022;

> David Harville, former Director of Global Resiliency, was sentenced to 24 months in prison in September 2022;

> Stephanie Popp, former Senior Manager of Global Intelligence, was sentenced to 12 months in prison in October 2022;

> Philip Cooke, a former Senior Manager of Security Operations, was sentenced to 18 months in prison and 12 months of home confinement in July 2021;

> Stephanie Stockwell, a former Manager of Global Intelligence, was sentenced to one year in home confinement in October 2022; and

> Veronica Zea, a contract intelligence analyst, was sentenced to one year in home confinement in November 2022.

CBS [1]:

> eBay to pay $3 million after couple became the target of harassment, stalking

> Devin Wenig, eBay's CEO at the time, shared a link to a post Ina Steiner had written about his annual pay. The company's chief communications officer, Steve Wymer, responded: "We are going to crush this lady."

> About a month later, Wenig texted: "Take her down." Prosecutors said Wymer later texted eBay security director Jim Baugh. "I want to see ashes. As long as it takes. Whatever it takes," Wymer wrote.

> Investigators said Baugh set up a meeting with security staff and dispatched a team to Boston, about 20 miles from where the Steiners live.

> "Senior executives at eBay were frustrated with the newsletter's tone and content, and with the comments posted beneath the newsletter's articles," the Department of Justice wrote in its Thursday announcement.

theres plenty more links out there if ya need them.

[0] https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/final-defendant-ebay-cybe...

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/feds-charge-ebay-stalking-scand...

galkk

12 days ago

This is as insane as it gets. Thanks for sharing.

galkk

12 days ago

At this moment I just assume by default that those “watchdogs”, “environmentalists”, “nonprofits” are mix of nimby-ists and/or thinly veiled attempts of extracting money

(it’s a nice things you got here. It would be a shame if some rare species of a frog would be found here. A small donation for the great cause/good, of course, would help us to work on ensuring that nobody gets in harms way).

viccis

12 days ago

>I just assume by default

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

galkk

12 days ago

Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.

jacquesm

12 days ago

Based on your original comment it would seem that this is aimed at yourself?

NicuCalcea

12 days ago

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

galkk

12 days ago

Nah. I pretty much said my option about types of organizations who were mentioned in the article, and the herd immediately assumed that I’m pro-corpo or whatever (enough to see in answers to my comments). Logic isn’t strong suit for many people, I accept that.

NicuCalcea

12 days ago

So it's okay for you to assume the motives of environmentalists you know nothing about, but you get your knickers in a bunch because you think others assume you're pro-corpo?

random_savv

12 days ago

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!

Nicksil

12 days ago

Do you still work for Google?

galkk

12 days ago

No. Any other questions?

BoredPositron

12 days ago

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.

galkk

12 days ago

Projecting much?

Where did I say that rules do not apply/shouldn’t apply? I specifically stated my opinion about many types of activists. I’ll repeat my other comment - article quotes only activists/enviromentalists/watchdogs, without any mention of their qualifications in the subject matter. Executive director at Bark, conservation director for environmental group (wtf does it even mean?) are not qualifications

BoredPositron

12 days ago

Since when are job titles qualifications?