Yes. As another comparison point, 13 million gallons per year amounts to 24 gallons per minute which is about 5 (five) bathtub faucets running 24/7/365.
The water bill alone would be only $100k/yr assuming average US domestic rate of $8 per 1000 gallons.
Median US household water usage is 130 gallons per day according to Wiki.[0]
So ~280 households worth of water? Though the US seems to be on the high end, using 3x more than Japan and 4x more than France (according to a random website)[1]
To state the obvious most people are not running big faucets all the time, and in fact are using way less.
It seems like a bit of a self-own to not just use household or per-capita usage here to prove a point though.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residential_water_use_in_the_U... [1]: https://www.worldometers.info/water/
Framings like this are bad because people think 280 households of water is a lot.
If we instead look at almonds, something that is a bit of a luxury nut and not at all a necessity, each almond takes about 1 gallon of water to grow.
A single truck shipment of almonds contains somewhere around 40-50 million almonds all packed up ready for their delivery to Costo or wherever.
So to frame this another way, Google's DC uses approximately 1/3 of a single truck load of almonds worth of water a year. Most almonds are grown in drought stricken California as well.
I'm sure we'll be staging the protests and forgoing our emerald nuts 100 cal snack packs any day now.
My state's gasoline refineries use about ~13 million gallons of water each day. It's about .7 gallons of water per gallon of gasoline refined.
I don't know if you mean to be reinforcing that it's nothing or not
Remind me median income?
$87k household. So that's 6 median incomes of water being used up by that datacenter. Put that way it doesn't sound bad, especially when you glance at the electric bill.
Also when it evaporates instead of going to the sewer that drops the price in half.
Edit: Oops I got that mixed up and was treating it like a per-faucet cost. So actually it's one full household income converted into water to handle the entire facility.
Yeah I’m sure someone on median income feels the same
Probably, yeah.
Do you think people look at big facilities and calculate that they're spending whatever times the medium wage on a crucial service and get mad about it?
Converting things into median wages is a way to put them into scale. They spent this many wages for construction, they spend this many on supplies, they sell this many in product, they hire this many people to work there. If anyone thinks its bad for anything a company buys to exceed a median wage, that's a very silly expectation and I wonder where they got it.
Remind me who leaves 8 bath tub faucets running 24/7/365?
Me?
So a system to recirculate the same 24 gallons per minute would be more expensive than $100k per year for water?
Condensing the steam back into water would undo the cooling power, so yes. Massively less efficient. Negative efficiency, as required by thermodynamics.
Your only gains would come from whatever increased surface area the system has, radiating energy however it can. But a radiator without any water involved would be as good or better. Air-cooled datacenters do exist, they're just trading other costs and usually can't release as much heat.
Apparently so