alt Hacker NewsThere's also a power generation water cost though!
Something like 500g/MWh for gas/coal/nuclear (~70% of power in AZ), so a huge xAI datacenter (Colossus 2, ~1 GW/h) would use ~700 MW of this type, or ~350k gallons of water an hour, which would be 0.2% of the Colorado rivers flow rate last year.
I don't know if that's significant.
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AnthonyMouse • today at 4:07 AM
It's the type of situation where that amount of water use isn't going to move the needle very much even in the desert, but building thermal power plants there there is still kind of silly because a) deserts are generally well-suited to solar, and b) you could also build thermal power plants in places like the midwest where that amount of water use is totally irrelevant.
Pulling recent data from the EIA, of the roughly 10,000 megawatts of new power capacity installed in Arizona between 2023 and 2025, 50% is batteries, 40% solar, 6.5% wind, and 3.5% gas. Now, most solar and wind plants rarely if ever hit their nameplate capacity, but it’s pretty clear the large majority of new power generation isn’t consuming water. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia860/