“An Irresponsible Use of Our Water”
Well, here in the Wild West, things are getting wilder. Fire season has already begun, and when I was a little girl, there was no such thing. We had a rainy season, but those days seem to be about gone too. Fire season? That’s a new season in our vocab that started about five years ago. It’s sad. Now the news is full of heat waves, unprecedented temps, and drought. All things drought.
I was pretty miffed a few years ago when we were deluged with rain after a huge dry spell and our then governor Jerry Brown made the stupid mistake of saying the drought was over. I was mystified. With 40 million people in a state that is half desert, there would never be any such time. We are in perpetual drought, and he called off conservation when he called off the drought. Shame on him. And here we are, back in drought again, only it’s worse, worse, worse.
Given that, imagine my upset stomach, sick to the core, when I read this article. While we live for all things “the cloud” — our photos, files, videos, chats, and everything else you can imagine are stored there — that “cloud” is actually rows and rows of servers jam packed into huge buildings. And they use a lot of water — a physical resource that is more and more precious and is literally blowing away keeping our computers cool. It’s sickening and a well-kept dirty secret that these buildings and server farms (which don’t really bring jobs, by the way) are ironically sucking us dry while we think we are doing some ephemeral thing “in the cloud.” Our internet use is as physical as it gets, folks, and it’s killing us.
I wanted to unplug everything when I read this, I was so upset. So I’m doing my bit to spread the word and asking the governors and mayors and city councils of this world to take a harsh look at whether their areas can really sustain these drunken sailors of buildings. When one server farm uses as much water as a 40–50,000-person city DAILY we have our priorities upside-down.
And it’s all so unnecessary. Per the article, much of the water waste is because of server farms using evaporative cooling instead of conventional refrigeration. Why? Because it saves electricity compared to using refrigeration, and the electricity costs more than the water. So basically, we’re letting a critical resource literally evaporate to save money. Really?
Obviously choosing money over the environment is a bad enough issue. But there’s a larger question: Why is this precious, non-renewable resource cheaper than electricity in the first place — especially in a desert! You know, where it’s relatively easy to make power using solar panels but pretty much impossible to make water? Again here, where are our priorities?
While we’re at it, we might also ask: Why are we building server farms that generate tons of heat and need so much cooling in deserts in the first place? The US has plenty of places with milder climates, even cold weather that could provide cooling for free.
That our elected officials let these buildings into places where they cause so much waste is disastrous. Move ’em out. Vote ’em out. Or force them to build desalination plants to pipe in water and send the salt east when the snowy highways emerge. IDK, but we can’t just let these server farms suck our cities dry. Did anyone realize this was going on? Ugh.