Skeptics of the proposed hyperscale data center in Box Elder County are sweating about a lot more than its energy demands and potential toll on water supplies.
Well, Davies has a point, communicating scale is the difficult part.
So, for those familiar with computers, think Scott this:
A typical Word doc or PDF is several hundred KB’s (kilobyte =1000 bytes) to 1MB (Megabyte 1m bytes) a jpg picture your phone takes, is 3-4MB. A full HD movie streamed online will be about 9GB (Gigabyte =1b bytes) of data. Obviously a movie is thousands of “images” stitched together so is file size with be significantly more. The same goes for that energy usage.
Similarly, Homes are measured in kW usage (technically usage per hour or kWh) on a monthly basis. You might use ~800-1,000kWh per month, maybe 10,000-11,000kWh a year. But let’s call it 1000kW are used, so 1mW or 1 megawatt. This data center would need at least 9,000x more energy per month as it’s gW scale, not mW or even kW… Plus, its power plant will be close by, so you’re creating heat and pollution to make the 9+gW energy and then USING up that energy and dumping 8+gW of heat, so his example calculated 16gW of heat being generated… That’s the equivalent of a good 16k homes, or ~60,000 people use.
THE KICKER that’s just to run the data center, think of the demand for the HVAC and ecological damage to using a lake’s water to cool equipment (water would be coming out over 100⁰F)…
Important and common misconception - kWh are not Kilowatts per hour and will lead to really bad math if you try and treat them as such. „Per“ has a specific meaning for units.
To be more specific, kW are already a unit of measurement over time (1 kW = 1 kJ/s), so kWh are actually a different way of measuring energy or Joules.
Also, the lake they’re using to cool the data center is in critical condition for drying out. The great salt lake is at a tipping point where if they can’t maintain the current levels it could turn into a toxic dust bowl effect where all the toxic shit that’s collected in the dead lake for millennia will end up in the air in the valley.
Which is really weird. The world desperately needs desalination for freshwater but we say we can’t do it because the water is too expensive due to energy costs, yet here is another case where we piss away heat. Free market fundamentalism will be the death of us all. No civilization this reckless was meant to survive.
One small correction. You switched units. You started with Watt-hours (kWh, energy) and then switched to Watts (GW, power). With the right units, it’s even more dramatic.
There are an average of about 730 hours in a month. If a home consumes 1000 kWh per month, that’s an average of 1.3 kW. If we divide 9 GW by 1.3kW, we get 6.9 million.
So this data center will use the same amount of energy as over 6 million homes. For reference, Utah has a population of 3.5 million (total people, not total number of homes).
Here’s another way of comparing the numbers. If this new data center uses 9 GW of power 24/7, that’s an about 6,500 GWh per month, or a little under 79,000 GWh per year.
In 2025, Utah produced a new record of over 35,000 GWh.
So this data center would more than triple the amount of energy produced in 2025.
THE KICKER that’s just to run the data center, think of the demand for the HVAC and ecological damage to using a lake’s water to cool equipment (water would be coming out over 100⁰F).
I keep seeing this on Lemmy, but why do so many people think that these datacenters are using water from reservoirs for “cooling”?
Datacenters use A/C for cooling, and if there’s any sort of “Liquid cooling” being used on these servers, it’s in a closed loop system.
Water isn’t being pumped out as steam or into the environment directly from datacenters, unless there’s some other method I’m missing here?
What I think is getting mixed up here is that, for many forms of generating electricity, water is needed to be heated up in some way to create steam. The steam then turns a turbine which moves some magnets to generate electricity.
Some of those powerplants are in closed loop systems with their water, some of them are not. Additionally, if the energy is coming from solar/wind/hydro then there shouldn’t be any concerns about water getting turned into steam anyway.
The steam then turns a turbine which moves some magnets to generate electricity.
Some of those powerplants are in closed loop systems with their water, some of them are not.
No. All steam turbine plants have an evaporation stage in their cycle. They might have part of the loop be closed, but there’s always some part of the thermal loop that’s open.
I mean when you heat up a lake, it starts evaporating faster. Also some have switched to using evaporative cooling instead of AC. That’s why they’re building them in deserts. You can save a lot of energy, but need to waste water. In the desert that might piss off people living nearby.
But yes, the power plant water use is actually bigger than direct use. If it’s a lossy thermal plant.
Thanks, looks like I was wrong. I looked into the evaporative cooling. It looks like this kicks in if it’s hot outside, otherwise the cooling units operate in a “dry” mode.
Although, none of that is directly heating up a lake, it looks like the water just flows into something like an A/C unit. Are there datacenters that are piping heat directly into lakes?
Are there datacenters that are piping heat directly into lakes?
Yes, Equinix is one company building them. Of course they’ll tell you that this results in zero water loss, but it can’t be good for the long term health of the lake to use it as a heatsink.
In cold climates with distance heating, though, it’s possible to make efficient use of the heated water in the cold months by using it for residential heating. Not very useful in the summer though.
This is the reason. Deserts are hotter, but also dryer, so it makes evaporative chillers ridiculously efficient. That’s how and why they build datacenters out here. Go look at any DC facility in the state and you’ll see evapco equipment being used.
Well, Davies has a point, communicating scale is the difficult part.
So, for those familiar with computers, think Scott this:
A typical Word doc or PDF is several hundred KB’s (kilobyte =1000 bytes) to 1MB (Megabyte 1m bytes) a jpg picture your phone takes, is 3-4MB. A full HD movie streamed online will be about 9GB (Gigabyte =1b bytes) of data. Obviously a movie is thousands of “images” stitched together so is file size with be significantly more. The same goes for that energy usage.
Similarly, Homes are measured in kW usage (technically usage per hour or kWh) on a monthly basis. You might use ~800-1,000kWh per month, maybe 10,000-11,000kWh a year. But let’s call it 1000kW are used, so 1mW or 1 megawatt. This data center would need at least 9,000x more energy per month as it’s gW scale, not mW or even kW… Plus, its power plant will be close by, so you’re creating heat and pollution to make the 9+gW energy and then USING up that energy and dumping 8+gW of heat, so his example calculated 16gW of heat being generated… That’s the equivalent of a good 16k homes, or ~60,000 people use.
THE KICKER that’s just to run the data center, think of the demand for the HVAC and ecological damage to using a lake’s water to cool equipment (water would be coming out over 100⁰F)…
Fuck AI!
Important and common misconception - kWh are not Kilowatts per hour and will lead to really bad math if you try and treat them as such. „Per“ has a specific meaning for units.
To be more specific, kW are already a unit of measurement over time (1 kW = 1 kJ/s), so kWh are actually a different way of measuring energy or Joules.
Also, the lake they’re using to cool the data center is in critical condition for drying out. The great salt lake is at a tipping point where if they can’t maintain the current levels it could turn into a toxic dust bowl effect where all the toxic shit that’s collected in the dead lake for millennia will end up in the air in the valley.
Which is really weird. The world desperately needs desalination for freshwater but we say we can’t do it because the water is too expensive due to energy costs, yet here is another case where we piss away heat. Free market fundamentalism will be the death of us all. No civilization this reckless was meant to survive.
Inevitable at this point :(
One small correction. You switched units. You started with Watt-hours (kWh, energy) and then switched to Watts (GW, power). With the right units, it’s even more dramatic.
There are an average of about 730 hours in a month. If a home consumes 1000 kWh per month, that’s an average of 1.3 kW. If we divide 9 GW by 1.3kW, we get 6.9 million.
So this data center will use the same amount of energy as over 6 million homes. For reference, Utah has a population of 3.5 million (total people, not total number of homes).
Here’s another way of comparing the numbers. If this new data center uses 9 GW of power 24/7, that’s an about 6,500 GWh per month, or a little under 79,000 GWh per year.
In 2025, Utah produced a new record of over 35,000 GWh.
So this data center would more than triple the amount of energy produced in 2025.
Thank you for the correction!! Yeah, it’s basically really bad lol
Just a quick correction, its M capital for Mega, m is for milli.
And Giga is also G capital, not sure there is a low case g for engineer notation.
I keep seeing this on Lemmy, but why do so many people think that these datacenters are using water from reservoirs for “cooling”?
Datacenters use A/C for cooling, and if there’s any sort of “Liquid cooling” being used on these servers, it’s in a closed loop system.
Water isn’t being pumped out as steam or into the environment directly from datacenters, unless there’s some other method I’m missing here?
What I think is getting mixed up here is that, for many forms of generating electricity, water is needed to be heated up in some way to create steam. The steam then turns a turbine which moves some magnets to generate electricity.
Some of those powerplants are in closed loop systems with their water, some of them are not. Additionally, if the energy is coming from solar/wind/hydro then there shouldn’t be any concerns about water getting turned into steam anyway.
No. All steam turbine plants have an evaporation stage in their cycle. They might have part of the loop be closed, but there’s always some part of the thermal loop that’s open.
I mean when you heat up a lake, it starts evaporating faster. Also some have switched to using evaporative cooling instead of AC. That’s why they’re building them in deserts. You can save a lot of energy, but need to waste water. In the desert that might piss off people living nearby.
But yes, the power plant water use is actually bigger than direct use. If it’s a lossy thermal plant.
Thanks, looks like I was wrong. I looked into the evaporative cooling. It looks like this kicks in if it’s hot outside, otherwise the cooling units operate in a “dry” mode.
Although, none of that is directly heating up a lake, it looks like the water just flows into something like an A/C unit. Are there datacenters that are piping heat directly into lakes?
Yes, Equinix is one company building them. Of course they’ll tell you that this results in zero water loss, but it can’t be good for the long term health of the lake to use it as a heatsink.
In cold climates with distance heating, though, it’s possible to make efficient use of the heated water in the cold months by using it for residential heating. Not very useful in the summer though.
This is the reason. Deserts are hotter, but also dryer, so it makes evaporative chillers ridiculously efficient. That’s how and why they build datacenters out here. Go look at any DC facility in the state and you’ll see evapco equipment being used.
This guy kilowatts.
It is fun. Bit per second, byte per second, makes a huge difference.