>>AMZ
Thanks. Interesting read.
It seems that if San Diego can filter out feces, drugs, cleaning products, and make the water fit to drink, data centers could certainly treat their water and make it fit to recirculate as coolant.
One of the fundamental ideas in Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert is that through most of the West, water is artificially cheap and that until it gets priced according to its actual cost, it makes sense to build a data center in the desert and let it use 1.25m gallons per day.
The book is old and there have been some positive changes. When it was written, many districts made it illegal to meter water. In other words, state law prohibited municipal districts from putting meters on houses or irrigation pipes. That's all past. In Fresno, as they rolled out meters sector by sector, they saw a 50% reduction in usage very quickly. But overall, I think most of what Reisner says holds up.