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#water#data#https#more#per#gallons#billion#alfalfa#centers#power

Discussion (92 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

rayiner•about 2 hours ago
Why can't we work up the political outrage over water-wasting agriculture in California that we managed to gin up over data centers: https://finance.biggo.com/news/202508220112_Data_Centers_vs_...

> Alfalfa irrigation (Colorado River): 1.6 trillion gallons annually

> Google data centers (global): 6.4 billion gallons in 2023

> Thermoelectric power plants: 41% of total US water use

EDIT: that page has a correction to some of the other numbers on the page, but the 6.4 billion gallons number quoted above for Google's data centers is in line with other sources: https://mostpolicyinitiative.org/science-note/data-center-wa... ("Google reported their data center water consumption increased from 4.3 billion gallons in 2021 to 6.1 billion gallons in 2024.").

ChuckMcM•about 1 hour ago
Its a fair question, California agriculture tends to use 11 trillion gallons (34e6 acre feet[1][2]) of water annually. (about 1,700 Googles worth). Generally from a market driven standpoint agricultural users are trying to get maximum $/acre out of their land. I'm trying to convince the state legislature to reclassify "solar farms"[3] as agriculture (as opposed to 'industrial' that they are today) which would allow a farm to decide on an acre by acre basis how much to plant and how much to put into solar farming. Presuming batteries were included in that allowance, 350,000 acres of California farmland as solar farms (panels + batteries for 24/7 power) would power the entire state 24/7 with no need for coal, gas, or nuclear power plants. 100% green energy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_in_California

[2] https://www.convertunits.com/from/billion+gallons/to/acre+fo...

[3] "Agrivoltaics as a climate-smart and resilient solution for midday depression in photosynthesis in dryland regions" -- https://www.nature.com/articles/s44264-025-00073-1

throwaway2037•about 2 hours ago

    > Thermoelectric power plants: 41% of total US water use
I did some research on this statistic. More than 90% of this is returned to source. So if the power plant is drawing water from a river (or aquifer), it is returned after being used to generate electricity (create steam, turn turbines).

For example, if you have a 1GW coal powerplant on a river, it might draw 4 billion liters of water per day, but will only evaporate about 5-10% of that amount. The rest is returned to the river. Of course, this is much less exciting (click-baity) than writing "41% of US water use is for thermoelectric power plants".

yreg•19 minutes ago
Is it different with data centers?
tesnorindian•about 2 hours ago
Most rivers drain into Oceans while some do drain into inland lakes.
supriyo-biswas•about 2 hours ago
Farming is a necessary activity and in most countries, they are also a politically influential group.

The case for data centers in the age of AI is weaker, and the only effects for the average person are noise, pollution, higher electricity costs, higher water costs, for the ultimate "benefit" of losing your job.

arjie•about 2 hours ago
The necessity of alfalfa exports from water-scarce US states is certainly not obvious. Why do you believe this is essential?
bsder•11 minutes ago
I'm all about stomping on the agribusiness water usage and think that whole swathes of agribusiness in CA should get shut down.

However, as I understand it, the alfalfa is a soil restorer that the agribusinesses are going to grow anyway. The question is whether there is any benefit to forcing the agribusinesses plow it under vs exporting it.

throwaway2037•about 2 hours ago

    > alfalfa exports from water-scarce US states
Which states are those?
fastball•about 2 hours ago
The thing about data centers and thermoelectric power plants is that you can make them effectively closed cycle, vs agriculture where that is somewhat intractable.

Not saying that is true today though.

voakbasda•about 2 hours ago
Even worse, my understanding is that much of that alfalfa gets put into shipping containers and sold overseas. The agricultural drain on the aquifers does not even benefit US ranchers.
hnav•about 2 hours ago
It benefits whoever has the water rights since they're effectively able to export something that they're not paying the externalities on.
voakbasda•about 1 hour ago
That’s the joke. We are literally letting those growers export our water and put the profit in their own pockets and at the public’s expense.
xahrepap•about 1 hour ago
Shipped to countries that have banned the growing of the crop because of water concerns
tzs•about 2 hours ago
Because a lot more consumers care about the milk that comes from the dairy cows in California that consume something like 75% of that alfalfa and the meat that comes from the animals that consume the rest than care about data centers?
JumpCrisscross•about 2 hours ago
Nobody actually cares about water use. It's a totem for other activism efforts. Data-centre protests aren't about water, they're about wealth inequality and Altman, Musk and Zuckerberg being hated men.
Rzor•about 2 hours ago
>Data-centre protests aren't about water

I suspect the people facing rising electricity cost and air-noise pollution beg to differ.

JumpCrisscross•about 1 hour ago
> suspect the people facing rising electricity cost and air-noise pollution beg to differ

I suspect they’re more concerned about “rising electricity cost[s] and air-noise pollution.”

culi•about 2 hours ago
They're about the environment. They're about corruption and local city councils being bought out. They're about white collar crime and all the skirting of regulation these developers are getting away with. They're about the affordability crisis. They're about one more tool that promises a massive concentration of wealth. They're about tools of war that have already resulted in the bombing of an elementary school. They're a backlash to silicon valley ideology. And imo, most of all, they're about class. I can't remember the last time the poor of all the political spectrum have been so united against something and the rich on both sides have been this apathetic to supportive.
JumpCrisscross•about 1 hour ago
Right. Big umbrellas seldom achieve policy goals. They’re about mobilising folks for something else. People don’t actually turn out over water. That’s the root of the problem and answer to rayiner’s conundrum.

Farms could double their water usage while datacenters halve theirs; the contours of protest wouldn’t materially change.

If you want to create a political coalition today, and have an AI datacenter being debated near you, rally against it. Like, try to stop it. But if you do doesn’t matter. The coalition is what matters. The datacenter—like the water—isn’t actually what anyone is angry about.

rayiner•about 1 hour ago
> And imo, most of all, they're about class. I can't remember the last time the poor of all the political spectrum have been so united against something and the rich on both sides have been this apathetic to supportive.

Being more worried about data centers than agricultural aquifer use is a damning indictment of the poor in this country, right up with the surprisingly bi-partisan nature of anti-vaxx thinking (https://www.politico.com/news/2026/04/14/poll-rfk-maha-vacci...)

MengerSponge•about 2 hours ago
Million, billion, and trillion sadly sound kind of the same when you talk about it.
b3lvedere•43 minutes ago
I agree that is a big part of the problems we have today. But my best guess is also that the systems/people/companies that tend to abuse their power do know extremely well that the layman cannot fathom the difference between the three.

Unfortunately most people also don't really care until the problems come hitting them so extremely close you have absolutely no coiche to act upon it. Then the massive outrages start. It's a very predictable cycle.

pstuart•about 2 hours ago
There has been outrage. It's yet another tragedy of the commons.

Water pricing should be revisited to be closer to its true value -- and while food production should be recognized as essential, even that has to be rethought: is growing alfalfa for dairy less vital than growing vegetables? Especially if that dairy is produced and consumed in Saudi Arabia?

The other thing that we should be doing all over is better management of our watersheds so we can try to replenish those aquifers.

brador•about 1 hour ago
84.1% of people have <115 IQ. The minimum required to critically think about the modern world and affect its function.

With AI that minimum is expected to increase.

b3lvedere•40 minutes ago
The immense amount of CO2 isn't also doing wonders on our brains.
topato•about 2 hours ago
lol, if you bothered to check the reference your “article” stole from, you’d find a medium post that includes ANOTHER link to a follow up medium post entitled, “I was wrong about data center water consumption”

It’s not 6 billion per day. It’s 650 billion per day. In the United States alone.

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

lol

rayiner•about 2 hours ago
Thank you for the note. But the article I linked to above relies on the page you linked for the Alfalfa number, not the data center number. The data center number in my article, 6.2 billion gallons annually for Google's data centers, is consistent with Google's numbers elsewhere: https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/data-center-water-use-bla...

Also, your correction needs as correction:

> If you simply take the Berkeley estimates directly, you get around 628 million gallons of water consumption per day for data centers, much higher than the 66-67 million gallons per day I originally stated. However, the methods used to produce these estimates are debatable, and seem to have been chosen to give the maximum possible value for data center water consumption. If you exclude the water “consumed” by hydroelectric plants via reservoir evaporation, you get something closer to perhaps 275 million gallons per day.1 And if you take into account the fact that lots of data center operators use renewable energy PPAs (mostly from wind and solar sources), my guess is that you get something closer to 200-250 million gallons per day (though I haven’t run a detailed calculation here).

It's not 675 billion gallons a day, it's 675 million, which is about 246 billion gallons a year.

avazhi•about 2 hours ago
Probably because food and agriculture (in the region that produces a quarter of America’s domestic food supply) are required for life, while data centers aren’t?
scarmig•about 2 hours ago
Although delicious, alfalfa is not required for life. A lot of it goes to Saudi Arabia, who use it for horses and cattle, as the Saudis banned it domestically for being wasteful for water usage.
culi•about 2 hours ago
It's also grown for the same reason soy is grown. It's a highly effective nitrogen fertilizer for the soil. It's also one of the most digestible and high-protein forages
throwaway2037•about 2 hours ago

    > alfalfa is not required for life
This quote doesn't do much for me. It is like saying that the insane amounts of corn and soy that US (and Brazil and Canada) farmers produce "is not required for life". If you think a little deeper, it is used to feed livestock, that are used for meat, that are "required for life". (Please don't respond with something dumb like "you can stay alive without meat". Yes, we know that.) For the record, Japan also imports lots of alfalfa from the US. Japan has far more fresh water than it can use, but it doesn't have enough arable land to grow the alfalfa that it needs to feed its livestock.
cobbzilla•about 1 hour ago
California has codified a water caste system. In 2015 (my last experience with this), citizens were ordered to cut water use 25% while ~400 pre-1914 claimants with magical "senior water rights" took 90% of the water. [1][2]

We conserved, rates still rose, f*ck the poor the most, so that select farmers can use however much water they want. During a drought. As allowed and protected by law.

[1]: https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/waterrights/water_issues/prog...

[2]: https://archive.gov.ca.gov/archive/gov39/2015/04/01/news1891...

ColdStream•about 2 hours ago
There are some reasonable books by William T Volleman called 'Carbon Ideologies' it is all about Nuclear and Coal power. Regardless of that, they are written focusing on the people that would be reading those books in a few hundred years time. The justification being that those that read it today already understand the issues. As such they are focused on a world that is deeply resource depleted and much hotter.

But it is the opening chapter that is very explicit in trying to highlight how most people live today. It isn't that we don't know what is happening or that we do not care, it is just that we have needs and wants that unfortunately have long term blow back. We are just trying to take care of others, but that is leading down a less desirable path.

I thought it was a great message that needs to sent to the future.

The aquifers are being drained, but it was being done to feed the people. Yes, it could have been handled much better but that core driving force behind it will probably be the same in hundred of years from now.

If that message isn't sent forwards, the stories that will be made in our place will not be very kind to us.

If that matters or not, that is up to you to decide. And that is the whole debate on 'What is legacy?'.

rho138•about 2 hours ago
We shouldn’t be thought of kindly. We’re essentially post food scarcity in the US and children are still sent to school starving. Not only did we fail the here and now, but we’ve failed our future brothers and sisters.
voakbasda•about 1 hour ago
The hilarity of being post food scarcity when the quality of food in stores has declined precipitously both in terms of nutrient density and taste. Most of the processed food contains high fructose corn syrup, sketchy preservatives, and worse. Even if people think we “succeeded” on this front, the truth is that we have failed. The ultimate consequences of our failure have yet to play out.
rexpop•10 minutes ago
Both are true: modern food systems can improve availability and shelf-stability while still degrading average nutritional quality.
basilgohar•about 2 hours ago
I disagree strongly and push back on this framing. It's technically correct but it subtracts the huge factor that maximizing short term profit plays, and couching that in "feeding the people" papers over that.

Just feeding people sufficiently, even at a high standard, wouldn't lead to the resource depletion and waste we are seeing today. But doing so at record profit levels does.

jahnu•about 2 hours ago
Exactly. It’s been done to enable luxury.
BobbyTables2•about 2 hours ago
Quite true.

Our own individual ancestors were not perfect people. But we only exist today because they survived.

avazhi•about 2 hours ago
Why would any of us care what people 200 or 500 years in the future think of us?

Peak irrelevance.

LanceH•about 3 hours ago
I see parallels between water rights "xxx acre feet per year" without regard for how much water is incoming, and pension funds where they simply declare how much will be paid out.

I really can't tell the difference between people being uncaring or just stupid about either.

p-e-w•about 2 hours ago
The whole pension fund concept only works because it declares how much is going to be paid out.

Who’s going to pay in if the fund expects a guaranteed commitment but refuses to give such in return?

JumpCrisscross•about 2 hours ago
> Who’s going to pay in if the fund expects a guaranteed commitment but refuses to give such in return?

Literally defined contribution [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defined_contribution_plan

arjie•about 2 hours ago
It’s called a defined contribution pension as opposed to a defined benefit pension. They exist.
skeeter2020•about 2 hours ago
not only do they exist, they are by far the more common variant. Whenever you hear about a massive unfunded pension liability it's a defined benefit plan.
ericd•about 2 hours ago
401ks don’t guarantee results for a given amount of input, and people still stuff away lots into them?
hvb2•30 minutes ago
The tax code is also really powerful in sending money to certain products
marking-time•about 2 hours ago
>In an aquifer that’s permanently collapsed, artificial recharge—pumping water forcibly back underground—is the only option, according to Shirzaei. That’s expensive and carries the risk of triggering earthquakes.

I have spent most of my life in the San Joaquin Valley and what I have been wondering about over the past few years is what is the effect removing all that water from the faults. Specifically, does this water removal cause the stresses along the faults to build making the resulting earthquakes larger?

stevenwoo•about 2 hours ago
Toward the end it briefly discusses a possible solution - expensive injection of water into aquifers that might have the side effect of triggering earthquakes like fracking for petroleum or some types of geothermal - there’s no winning.
Aquitard•about 2 hours ago
It has more possible side effects than just earthquakes (not my expertise in a geological stable country). One such side effect of mixing two types of groundwater is the potential to release minerals in the geological medium that can be above beneficial use criteria (and ultimately contaminate the groundwater). There is a USGS program called PHREEQC that is used for this specific type of modelling.
JumpCrisscross•about 2 hours ago
> does this water removal cause the stresses along the faults to build making the resulting earthquakes larger?

Water lubricates fault zones [1]. Putting it into an inactive fault makes it active. Taking it out of an active fault makes the quakes less frequent and more powerful.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00137...

tesnorindian•about 2 hours ago
As the Super El-Nino is at its peak, South India is facing an acute water crisis

https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/cauvery-water-managem...

#SaveWater #SaveElectricity #SaveFuel

Interestingly none of our Govts. or Leaders are talking about conservation yet and the ancient water laws/standards don't take climate change into consideration. For eg. as per BIS IS 1172: 1993 standards an average Indian is entitled to 135 Liters of water per day when the actual supply is not even close to 50 liters per Indian per day. This is level of water crisis India is facing today.

throwaway2037•about 2 hours ago
The answer is desalination plants. Look at rich water-stressed countries in the Middle East and North Africa. All of them use extensive desalination plants. India has lots of very smart engineers. I am sure you can build them. Another thing: India needs to build the equivalent of the California State Water Project to move water from wet areas to dry areas. (China did the same.)
tesnorindian•about 1 hour ago
+1 for moving water from wet areas to dry areas. But desalination plants comes at a huge cost.
rayiner•about 2 hours ago
Most of the southwest should not have people living in it. It's a fake place that is enabled to exist by massive and unnatural engineering projects, like dams on the Colorado river. We need to create a long term plan to relocate the population to other parts of the country.
aesthesia•about 1 hour ago
You can make this kind of claim about living in lots of different places. Some amount of engineering and technology has been necessary to enable humans to live in most parts of the world. What determines the line?
augment_me•about 3 hours ago
Who cares there is so much more to exploit. For example no-one has yet moved massive freshwater icebergs by boat, and its up for grabs!
arjie•about 2 hours ago
Pretty clever idea. Sadly uneconomical when compared to desalination because I love the idea of iceberg calf hunting. Ripe for a novel Moby Dick - The target is already a large white object. Call me Icemael.

Got a bit of a Cold War era pykrete like project feeling.

b3lvedere•26 minutes ago
Given enough solar/wind/battery power i do wonder if a desalination plant could run pretty cheaply. A quick chat with ChatGPT tells me it should be feasible. Roughly investing around 1 billion dollars and around 40 million per year for keeping it run producing around 100.000 m³ per year. Cost price of the water would be around $0.20 per m³. Could run for more than 25 years.
JumpCrisscross•about 2 hours ago
> The only way to know for sure whether permanent compaction has occurred is through expensive core samples or other measurements at depth

Wouldn't it be for rain to fall and the aquifer's levels to rebound less than expected?

stevenwoo•about 2 hours ago
That is what the one expert quoted said but others thought it might still come back over a longer time period - I interpreted it to mean that method as being more accurate than the one season refill rate.
tesnorindian•about 2 hours ago
Yes, looks like they are acting like a sponge whose efficiency to retain water decreases as time passes.
water-data-dude•about 2 hours ago
For anyone interested in the history of water in the American West (what's different about the west, and how did we get here?), I recommend the extremely interesting and readable book Cadillac Desert, by Marc Reisner.
throwaway2037•about 2 hours ago
I have been reading articles like this for more than 20 years. Really, it feels like click/rage-bait at this point. The answer is pretty simple: (1) Build desalination plants (Calif already has a few) and (2) switch to more efficient uses of water in agriculture (drip irrigation, that is already widely practiced in water stressed areas of the world). Sure it costs money, but California is insanely rich and can afford to make these changes. For the last 100 years, Calif has been farming on "easy mode". Ok, so now it gets a little bit harder.

    > California’s Central Valley, where one-quarter of the food produced in the United States is grown
I am so tired of this quote. It is 25% of total (economic) value, not by calories or volume or weight. This quote is very misleading.
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morkalork•about 3 hours ago
You all knew how it was going to end, for decades, and did nothing.

https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/location-maximum-land-subs...

bayarearefugee•about 3 hours ago
> You all knew how it was going to end, for decades, and did nothing.

And the same is true for global carbon-related climate change, for which the real bill will become increasingly due over the next 10 years.

We are all insanely fucked and our response is still just to mostly to ignore it and hope it goes away.

darth_avocado•about 2 hours ago
> We are all insanely fucked and our response is still just to mostly to ignore it and hope it goes away.

Correction. It’s the next generations who are insanely fucked. People don’t hope it goes away, they think they won’t be around to see the consequences.

ares623•about 2 hours ago
Mother Nature has always been historically very considerate with regards to our schedules.
softjobs•about 2 hours ago
Thank you for posting that, saved me from doing so.

Ignorance and stupidity are the greatest threats to human survival - but perhaps it's for the best.

cryptoegorophy•about 3 hours ago
What can you realistically do?
theossuary•about 3 hours ago
Start by not electing a pedophile who calls climate change a hoax
ToucanLoucan•about 2 hours ago
Right?! Like there’s so much you can do.

* Vote for fucks sake. Bare minimum and stop making fucking excuses both for yourself not doing it and for politicians you otherwise support burying their heads in the sand.

* Stop buying stupid shit on the internet. Every package you don’t get delivered means less CO2.

* Fix shit instead of replacing it. The greenest EV on earth is more CO2 intense than the car you’ve already got (assuming you keep it in good working order)

Like yeah global policy needs to get better across the board, and the burden has been unfairly and ridiculously shifted to consumers. True. But at the same time consumers could buy less shit overall, still have very comfortable existences, and promote economic degrowth a little bit every day.

Oh yeah and stop using fucking AI for anything besides code because it sucks at everything else, and only use it for code you can’t otherwise complete.

p-e-w•about 2 hours ago
Doing something about this is the job of the government, not of “you all”. If taking care of such essential matters is somehow the responsibility of society as a whole, we may as well get rid of governments altogether.
arjie•about 2 hours ago
Governments are just a structure for people to coordinate collective action. In democracies, it’s not that distinct from “us all”. We exercise this responsibility through representatives but they are our agents not our rulers. Outcomes depend on our ability to direct them, and the ability of our opponents to do so likewise.

For the most part, I like to forward evolve solutions so I happily don’t care if Las Vegas runs out of water or whatever. I’ll find a way later. So I take responsibility for my bit. I just don’t care about this particular negative outcome.

toomuchtodo•about 3 hours ago
I think it’s somewhat fortunate when these aquifers permanently compress, it takes the land out of agriculture production as a sort of forced conservation, because in many ways, humans cannot be trusted to be responsible stewards of such a natural finite resource.

https://uttoncenter.unm.edu/resources/2026-06-1-update-paper...

https://www.organicproducenetwork.com/organic-growers/califo...

boothby•about 2 hours ago
Sci-fi brings us some optimism on that front. You can build out Brawndo distribution pipes overland.
altcognito•about 3 hours ago
? The land isn't conserved if you can't use it?
thaumasiotes•about 3 hours ago
Conservation is basically defined as being unused by humans.
toomuchtodo•about 3 hours ago
The land is conserved by not being farmed.

https://www.tuletrust.org/land-fallowing-program