Daten gehen verloren: Uns wird gesagt, dass wir unsere Duschen abbrechen sollen, aber Rechenzentren sind keinem solchen Druck ausgesetzt

The anti data centre stuff is all getting a bit hysterical.

They don’t seem to use much water here.

Data centres aren’t using vast amounts of drinking water, they’re being scape-goated. They use electricity to cool, with all the electronics they don’t want vast amount of water flowing about anyway.

Lol data centres account for less than 1% of our annual water usage.
Im not pro data centres but they have become an easy target for bashing

I think the worry about water is imported from other countries who have significantly higher temperatures and lower rainfall than we do. This country is pretty well set up for data centers in that regard. However we do need to generate a lot more renewable energy to power them.

There are so many valid critiques of data centres that this is a bit silly. The majority are based here in Ireland to avail of the temperate climate to use free air cooling. Just transplanting US-based arguments against data centres here doesn’t work. Beside that – is any industry being told to conserve water? 

>While Uisce Éireann has reported that data centres use less than 0.3% of drinking water, at a rate of five million litres per day (depending on the weather), the accuracy of that figure is questionable

Oh is it questionable? Article is like a Reddit post. Seems to line up with their investigation.

What’s the hose pipe got to do with showers?

Alis it only focusing on the water because of the dry spell were experiencing rather than focus on the actual issue if electricity.

clickbait and useless fearmongering.

Keep seeing people at car washes too

I heard 95% of data centre employees drive SUV’s to work.

0.3% ….but we will just ignore that 35% is lost through leaks ….

I think it’s important to note that there is no special provision for Data Centres when it comes to water use. The exception from the Hosepipe ban comes from the fact that they’re a commercial entity. They are subject to water charges, which is argued to be a deterrent. That’s debatable, but also exempt is every other non-domestic use, from Pharma to Golf Courses.

With regards to the hidden use, I genuinely believe that it’s a case of Uisce Éireann having no clue what’s going on. The way they were set up and their lack of funding leaves our water at the mercy of austerity. We leak so much water. Tralee leaks enough for a town twice its size. I reckon this is much higher, and UÉ are running around trying to patch so many holes that they do not have a good sense of what is being abstracted. Especially when an entity with a lot of money (such as but not limited to a data centre) starts abstracting more privately it goes under their nose.

On top of this, We have heavy rain on the west, eroding the ground around the pipes and leaving the underfunded areas outside of Dublin exposed. Meanwhile, we have all this industrial and population growth in the east, where there’s less rain. Even without the highest leakage in Western Europe our water resource is going to struggle.

I feel there’s a lot of issue people present with Data Centres that they’re happy leave at the door of Data Centres when they’re emblematic of the wider divide in the country. If our water supply is under threat after this heatwave, it doesn’t bode well for every summer going forward. We should be looking past charges for commercial use and actually restricting use to essential services. We should be looking at how UÉ will be unable to respond to future, worse heatwaves. This would mean doing away with this protection commercial use gets altogether. This would mean actually planning our water allocation, as opposed to now where it feels like we only respond as a snail’s pace. Highlighting data centre use can be a conduit to discuss this issue, but from what I’ve seen in how it’s reported and discussed, it just seems to obfuscate the wider water landscape.

30% of water traveling through Uisce Éireann’s pipelines comes out of broken pipes and is lost.

I wish we had half as much journalistic attention on the Shannon pipeline (that has been „in progress“ for 30+ years and would make all of this redundant) and the millions of liters lost to leaks in the pipes (and how much we’ve paid Uisce Éireann to supposedly fix them).

Like we’re actually on the edge of a water crisis and we’re shouting about 0.3% water usage. Data centers don’t belong here, but if you want to talk water, let’s talk water.

Not even focusing on data centers. I live literally next door to a car wash that used to be sparsely used. Now there’s a line of cars from opening till closing time waiting. We can’t use hose pipes, but somebody can run car wash water 16 hours a day to make money. Makes no sense at all. 

Leaks use about 250x more water than datacentres, these articles are useless and misguiding, not sure the fascination. Pharma and farming use waayyyy more than datacentres, why not focus on the real issues rather than click bait