The wrong building.
Look for a data center's water and you will look at the wrong building. It was spent at the power plant, before the electricity ever arrived.
The water leaves as steam, and it leaves before the work starts.
A power plant makes electricity by boiling water and cooling what it boils. Some of that water evaporates. It rises, it leaves the basin, and it does not come back. By the time the electricity reaches a server hall, that water is already gone.
Consumed, not withdrawn. Withdrawn water goes back to the river. Consumed water does not.
You will not find this number by metering the building harder.
What a campus spends on its own cooling is real and worth measuring. It is also the smaller question, and it is the only one anyone has been asking.
The larger number is already in the grid. It sits in public data, in the hour the electricity was made, and it does not need an operator's permission to compute. We publish it first and let anyone check the arithmetic.
A count and a bar.
The Count
What the grid did in a given hour. How much water it consumed for each unit of electricity, and how much carbon came with it. Read from public grid data, about a day behind, never real time.
The Bar
What that basin can afford. A published threshold, dated and versioned, set for the place rather than for the world.
An hour in. A verdict out.
Two gates, and an hour has to clear both.
Modeled until metered. Interim default where no basin prescription exists yet.
Standard §5.2 →An hour that clears both is certified. An hour that misses either is published as a miss with the reason attached. Fail is fail, and there is no price at which a gate opens.
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. Each basin gets its own bar, published and dated.
Every certificate carries the version it was graded under. When a threshold changes, it changes going forward. The past is never re-graded by the present.
If your own meters tell a truer story, bring them.
The modeled number publishes either way. An operator who engages replaces the modeled figure with a metered one at their own cost, and it stands whichever way it cuts.
Payment buys fidelity and standing. It never buys the verdict.
Most hours do not clear.
We publish the misses in the same place as the passes, at the same size.
Look at the right building.
The meter runs today on public grid data and modeled facilities. Running it somewhere real, with metered water and real workloads, is the next step.