Most data centers refusing to say how much water, electricity they use

From the article:

> The European Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) obliges data centers with an installed capacity of at least 500 kilowatts (kW) to report data including their energy and water consumption. In practice, few do so, despite the directive being in effect for three years.

I do not understand how that is even possible.

If any law is supposed to have any practical impact on the society, it needs to be enforced. Otherwise it is a guideline at best, not a law.

I think what would help is for these companies to each receive strict and hefty fines for non-disclosing the electricity and water consumption data they are obliged to disclose.

I assume that after that they would report all the required data very quickly.

I think it would be helpful for people in this thread to understand the differences between EU Regulations and Directives :

• EU Regulation: A binding legal act that applies immediately and identically in all EU countries as soon as it takes effect, without needing national laws.

• EU Directive: A legislative act that sets a mandatory goal that all EU countries must achieve, but allows each nation to pass its own laws to implement it.

It takes time for directives to take effect, unless a member state's national law already implements them.

Playing the devil’s advocate: don’t “freedom of information” laws mostly apply to government agencies? If so, why would a private company provide this information?

I personally believe at the very least the water usage is heavily overblown compared to the agriculture industry. Elecricity is a different issue, and governments should consider reporting requirements or something like that.

Being angry with datacenter providers is not the solution. And they also need to be built somewhere, and that place is probably best where electricity is abundant and/or cheap.

In the US, the rhetorical trick is to include the 3.4T* gallons of water utilized for power generation along with cooling (160B) to make this number super scary when water was utilized for power generation because it's a good cheap relatively clean power source so the datacenters were built near hydroelectric plants.

We can't do much about the 160B, but we could do a lot to build more power generation and storage. As just one example, in west Texas, natural gas is flared into the sky en masse from depleted oil wells because methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. Some sites could be tapped to hit hundreds of megawatts to a gigawatt of power generation. And any power you don't need can be exported to the Texas power grid so it can make money the day you turn it on. And if you're willing to spend a little more, you can sequester the CO2 and make the power generation mostly green.

Cue crickets from Silicon Valley on this one because it's neither nuclear nor renewable, but the crypto people love it so I would guess they'll eventually come around. That they haven't already is one facet of my disenchantment with tech culture. Their absurd belief in Star Trek Voyager-like scenarios playing out with AI in the next decade the other major one.

*Which is slightly more than the 3.3T gallons of water Americans used to water their lawns. So, ya know, where's the outrage?

They refuse it because if they would say "1 million liters a year!" the knee-jerk reaction will be completely predictable even though that's just tiny compared to a small swimming pool or industrial or agricultural site.

The debate is completely based on emotion and anger right now, so sharing information will only give the emotional/angry folks more mud to throw with. The majority of people has no clue about how to put things like energy use and water use in perspective, and they're also not interested in doing that. Because they have decided to green-wash their AI-fears as environmental fears... which is a big fat joke because datacenters aren't significant polluters or consumers compared to almost all other industries.

Look, I get it, many people are afraid of the societal impacts of AI, or distrust it in another way. But let's be honest and focus on _that_ instead of naively acting as if our anti-datacenter sentiment comes from environmental concerns (the last few decades have shown we don't GAF about the environment).

EU is in such a weird position. They are realizing that software, robotics, and generally automation through AI is the industrial future, but they seem to be paralyzed to actually start the build-up that will feed that frontier industry and economy.

Wise.

Continuing a conversation is often just a slow-drip Streisand effect.

Yet, at the bottom of the article:

> In the Netherlands, it is estimated that they account for about 0.1 percent of total consumption.

If that's true, what's the problem?

I wouldn't either. Nor would I if I was a manufacturer of widgets. Competitive secret. You can draw a correlation from resource use to output.

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