I've Looked at the Cloud From Both Sides Now

Jim Lauria

In Bakersfield, at Mazzei headquarters, a cloudless sky is a common sight—especially during the current drought. However, the folks up in Silicon Valley have dreamed up a massive global cloud…and it’s full of water.

Joni Mitchell looked at clouds from both sides and realized she really didn’t know clouds at all. Neither do we, but a close look at the virtual databank, and the very real infrastructure that supports it—reveals ties to water on every level.

Let’s cut through the fog and look at the machinery behind the cloud, the massive server farms that store the data we’re busy floating up into this virtual space.

At the heart of every server beats stacks of silicon chips. A single silicon chip factory can use 2 to 4 million gallons of ultra-pure water—which is itself the product of extensive treatment that loses 20 to 40 percent of its volume before it reaches the ultra-pure state—per day. According to this podcast of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, that’s enough water to supply 40,000 to 50,000 people.

If silicon is the heart of the machine, then its veins are copper. As with silicon, copper demands extraordinary amounts of water. Most is used for flotation beneficiation (a separation process in which copper particles from crushed ore attach to air bubbles in an alkaline water solution), smelting, electro-refining and transporting tailings to ponds. According to a 2010 report by the Arizona Department of Mines and Mineral Resources, mining and processing copper required up to 62.3 gallons of water per pound of copper.

Then there’s the gold (16 to 26 million gallons of water per day in large-scale surface mines), the rare earth metals and the minerals that make up the servers, computers and smart phones that connect us. Here’s a stunning figure: in the 1980s, cell phones were made with 11 minerals; today, a cell phone contains more than 60, as Tony O’Neill of mining giant Anglo American pointed out in a speech last year.

Then there’s glass, plastic (a water-intensive manufacturing process of materials derived from petroleum, which itself demands massive amounts of water to obtain and refine) and the water required to cool the heat-generating banks of servers.

And the energy. Oh, the energy. I’ll cover energy in a post all its own, but right now, let’s just stick with the figure that every barrel of oil drawn from American subterranean formations is tied to the consumption of an average of 7.5 barrels of water. Here’s a link to a blog post I wrote about the water-oil nexus a few years ago.

I don’t want to rain on your parade when we’re talking about the cloud. Yes, it represents a remarkable amount of water consumption. But the cloud also represents a phenomenal opportunity to improve water efficiency.

Smart meters, SCADA controllers that fine-tune demand based on real-time conditions, control logic, and high-tech planning tools like computational fluid dynamics (CFD) that can help us design more efficient systems are revolutionizing the water industry. We can predict water, trace water, measure it and control it…and in a steadily increasing number of situations, we can do it from our phones or tablets via the cloud.

Watch forums like this month’s WaterSmart Innovation 2015 for insight into the present and future of cloud-based water solutions. Tapping the massive data capacity of the cloud, we will understand water, and manage it, better than ever. That is a ray of sunshine that can brighten any cloudy day.