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.

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.

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).

Maybe I'm being naive, but the policies needed here feel quite simple. First, since data centers likely need some kind of treated (i.e. demineralized) water, and they want to use local municipal supplies, then they can do so only if they pay full market rate for that water. I would push for them to pay 1% to 5% above market rate to help offset other costs, but market rate at minimum. At no point should homeowners and/or residential customers subsidize this usage. Second, commercial users (including data centers) should only get water produced by treatment plants in excess of residential needs. Plants can only treat so much, pipes can only carry so much, and priority goes to residential first. Third, ground water is off limits for any commercial/industrial evaporative cooling uses. If data centers want to cool that way, then they need a different source of water. Did I miss anything?

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.