The 'dirty secret' of water waste

Recently, the California governor ordered the state’s first ever water restriction measures, citing a ‘historic drought’ in the region. Silicon Valley is home to some of the biggest technology giants – the operations of which have come under fire by environmental campaigners (such as Greenpeace) many times in the past. Green IT expert and Iceotope founder, Peter Hopton, however, believes the water consumption of tech giants is a cause for concern.

Alarming, publically available water use figures of one particular web giant’s data centre facilities include:

· A US data centre that evaporates 20,000 litres of water per hour
· Inside, each individual server consumes more water than the average person
“The water use of data centres is insane, especially when viewed in a time of ‘historic drought’ in California, where many facilities are based,” said Peter Hopton, Iceotope founder. “Under pressure from environmental campaigners, web giants have tried their very best to make these facilities as efficient as possible, but they’ve done so by evaporating clean water in order to cool the air around the electronics. It doesn’t seem like a good trade off to me. With a typical server drinking as much water as the average human being per day, I know who I’d rather give it to.

“The situation in California right now is a perfect snapshot of the digital economy in general. Tech is a massive consumer, but it stays under the radar because we’re so dependent on it. There’s also a case to be made that, because of the good that tech does elsewhere, we’re happy to let some of the less positive things slide too. There’s definitely a limit though and we can’t sweep everything under the rug.

“When you analyse the situation, it’s easy to see how some data centres have ended up evaporating as much water as a small city uses. The problem is a metric called PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness), which is how many data centres measure their environmental performance. In air cooled faculties, you can improve this stat by evaporating clean water. Sure, it’s an easy way to increase environmental performance, but at what cost? We should be paying much more attention to WUE (Water Use Effectiveness), an underappreciated and underused metric by the industry in general, particularly as invaluable clean water supplies become increasingly scarce.

“We need to break this model of using air and water to cool IT. Servers don’t need to waste water in order to keep electronics cool, there are alternative solutions available. Indeed, unlike most IT server designs, Iceotope’s technology does not need to evaporate or waste clean water at all. Technology industry leaders must evaluate their priorities and assess whether they can realistically continue to ignore the water waste issue. For tech leaders in California, this drought could very well be the tipping point.”