Most data centers refusing to say how much water, electricity they use

stingraycharles

Playing the devil’s advocate: don’t “freedom of information” laws mostly apply to government agencies? If so, why would a private company provide this information? I personally believe at the very least the water usage is heavily overblown compared to the agriculture industry. Elecricity is a different issue, and governments should consider reporting requirements or something like that. Being angry with datacenter providers is not the solution. And they also need to be built somewhere , and that place is probably best where electricity is abundant and/or cheap.

petcat

EU is in such a weird position. They are realizing that software, robotics, and generally automation through AI is the industrial future, but they seem to be paralyzed to actually start the build-up that will feed that frontier industry and economy.

unglaublich

They refuse it because if they would say "1 million liters a year!" the knee-jerk reaction will be completely predictable even though that's just tiny compared to a small swimming pool or industrial or agricultural site. The debate is completely based on emotion and anger right now, so sharing information will only give the emotional/angry folks more mud to throw with. The majority of people has no clue about how to put things like energy use and water use in perspective, and they're also not interested in doing that. Because they have decided to green-wash their AI-fears as environmental fears... which is a big fat joke because datacenters aren't significant polluters or consumers compared to almost all other industries. Look, I get it, many people are afraid of the societal impacts of AI, or distrust it in another way. But let's be honest and focus on _that_ instead of naively acting as if our anti-datacenter sentiment comes from environmental concerns (the last few decades have shown we don't GAF about the environment).

cj

Yet, at the bottom of the article: > In the Netherlands, it is estimated that they account for about 0.1 percent of total consumption. If that's true, what's the problem?

zulux

Wise. Continuing a conversation is often just a slow-drip Streisand effect.

pbasista

From the article: > The European Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) obliges data centers with an installed capacity of at least 500 kilowatts (kW) to report data including their energy and water consumption. In practice, few do so, despite the directive being in effect for three years. I do not understand how that is even possible. If any law is supposed to have any practical impact on the society, it needs to be enforced . Otherwise it is a guideline at best, not a law. I think what would help is for these companies to each receive strict and hefty fines for non-disclosing the electricity and water consumption data they are obliged to disclose. I assume that after that they would report all the required data very quickly.

ericvogelpohl

I wouldn't either. Nor would I if I was a manufacturer of widgets. Competitive secret. You can draw a correlation from resource use to output.

ExpertAdvisor01

I think it would be helpful for people in this thread to understand the differences between EU Regulations and Directives : • EU Regulation: A binding legal act that applies immediately and identically in all EU countries as soon as it takes effect, without needing national laws. • EU Directive: A legislative act that sets a mandatory goal that all EU countries must achieve, but allows each nation to pass its own laws to implement it. It takes time for directives to take effect, unless a member state's national law already implements them.

LogicFailsMe

In the US, the rhetorical trick is to include the 3.4T* gallons of water utilized for power generation along with cooling (160B) to make this number super scary when water was utilized for power generation because it's a good cheap relatively clean power source so the datacenters were built near hydroelectric plants. We can't do much about the 160B, but we could do a lot to build more power generation and storage. As just one example, in west Texas, natural gas is flared into the sky en masse from depleted oil wells because methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. Some sites could be tapped to hit hundreds of megawatts to a gigawatt of power generation. And any power you don't need can be exported to the Texas power grid so it can make money the day you turn it on. And if you're willing to spend a little more, you can sequester the CO2 and make the power generation mostly green. Cue crickets from Silicon Valley on this one because it's neither nuclear nor renewable, but the crypto people love it so I would guess they'll eventually come around. That they haven't already is one facet of my disenchantment with tech culture. Their absurd belief in Star Trek Voyager-like scenarios playing out with AI in the next decade the other major one. *Which is slightly more than the 3.3T gallons of water Americans used to water their lawns. So, ya know, where's the outrage?

diamondDrill

what about how much BS?

frunklooper

Less than they do if there were people living on that same land, and way less than they use in China. Get over it, data centers and progress is the future.

nickvnn

You already know for sure what the reason is, don't you?

f-serif

I live in a country with unlimited water supply. Can someone explain the data center water usage? Data center don't drink water. It cools down the machine. What's preventing them getting cool water from a lake and draining to it again to cool down? Where is water going after usage since there is literally zero water consumption?

titzer

FTA: > According to the latest figures from Statistics Netherlands (CBS), data centers used 5.1 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in the Netherlands in 2024. That is 4.6 percent of the country’s total electricity consumption, a near doubling in five years. Grid operator TenneT projects that data centers will consume 10 to 15 percent of the Netherlands’ electricity by 2030. Yeah, so 2030 sounds like a long way off. It's 3 years away. We are not going to be meeting any climate targets.

mtnsails

the article spells out other data points, so why not query AI to estimate what they fail to disclose?

Kuyawa

Duh, check their utility bills?

mtnsails

Clause Opus 5.5 reports that based on the 5.1 billion kWh used it's about 9.2 billion liters in Europe (cited from the Water Usage Effectiveness WUE industry-average). About 1.8 liters per kWh.

jeffbee

How much electricity does a Dr. Pepper bottling plant use? Oh they don't publish that either? Curious.

thelittlenag

Maybe I'm being naive, but the policies needed here feel quite simple. First, since data centers likely need some kind of treated (i.e. demineralized) water, and they want to use local municipal supplies, then they can do so only if they pay full market rate for that water. I would push for them to pay 1% to 5% above market rate to help offset other costs, but market rate at minimum. At no point should homeowners and/or residential customers subsidize this usage. Second, commercial users (including data centers) should only get water produced by treatment plants in excess of residential needs. Plants can only treat so much, pipes can only carry so much, and priority goes to residential first. Third, ground water is off limits for any commercial/industrial evaporative cooling uses. If data centers want to cool that way, then they need a different source of water. Did I miss anything?

OWaz

I don't know which data center it is, some remote location of Canada, that has 100 million litres of fuel trucked up each month for it's generators. I don't think that has a long term plan behind it because 100m liters of anything is a lot, and with the price of fuel now it's definitely not a small line item. Btw I heard this second hand a friend in the mining industry.