Independent water accounting for compute.
Aquadrio measures the water consumed generating a data center's electricity, hour by hour, and grades every hour against its basin's limit.
Most of that water evaporates at the power plants, not at the building, and no site meter records it. The record is public, including the hours that fail, and no operator commissions it.
See the yearly water draw
upstream water behind that electricity, per year
274.2 million gallons MODELED
flat load x 8,760 h x 313 gal/MWh on MISO-Central (measured, EIA 2024 cooling mix, consumption basis; Standard §5.2 and the published method memos). The facility's own ceiling where it sits: 1.8 L/kWh strictly under (the labeled interim default).
Running a data center consumes water in two places. Only one of them is the building.
Put them in the same unit and the comparison needs no assumptions.
- Upstream sits here, ~1.18 L/kWh
- Fixed by the grid mix. Left of this mark the power plant consumes more than the building; right of it, the building does.
- The 1.8 L/kWh water gate
- A ceiling for certification, not a limit on what a building can spend. Past it an hour still gets counted; it just cannot certify. Standard §5.2 →
~313 gal/MWh converted to ~1.18 L/kWh. EIA-860 2024 cooling codes crossed with EIA-923 2024 net generation, MISO-Central cooling-typed, hydro net reservoir evaporation included. Consumption basis. At 1 GW flat for a year, ~2.7 B gal, modeled.
1.8 L/kWh is the water gate, a labeled interim default where no basin prescription exists. A facility's own figure stays modeled until its meters land on the record.
Three basins drawn on one scale. Each has its own ceiling in a different place, and each draws a different amount, so the same quantity of water clears the ceiling in one basin and exceeds it in another.
The ceiling depends on the basin.
A gallon in a dry basin is not a gallon in a wet one. One national threshold would be wrong almost everywhere, so the method is universal and the numbers are local.
The electricity a job draws already consumed water upstream. No cooling choice can undo it.
Every megawatt-hour on the grid we watch arrives having already consumed water at a power plant, before a single fan spins in a server hall. Air-cool the hall and the building's own number falls toward zero. The upstream number does not move.
Basis: EIA-860 (2024 cooling codes) crossed with EIA-923 (2024 net generation), hydro net reservoir evaporation included. The figure is consumption, not withdrawal.
The meter runs whether or not the gate opens.
Live from the grid's own published data, about a day behind, never real-time. Most hours no clean certification is available, and the record says exactly that.