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Improper redaction reveals Lincoln’s Google Data Center water and electricity usage
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this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2026
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53 megawatts "during peak electrical demand" or "last year"?
Because timespans matter. 53 megawatts is the rough average annual power consumption of 5 households. So if that's the datacenter's annual power usage... they're not using that much power after all. On the other hand, if that's the monthly usage, that's more in line with compute/data center usage. And if it's daily use... 😬
Same with the water. 13 million gallons is about 260 thousand bathtubs worth of water. That's basically what a town of ~300k will use in one night for bathing only. So for annual usage it's not that bad. For monthly usage it's passable. For daily usage... again 😬
You're thinking of MWh, this is MW.
Meaning at a given moment of peak usage, it's drawing that many MW. If it draws that much for 1 hour, then it consumed that many MWh.
A year's worth of 5 households' power consumption is one hour of peak operation is pretty bad...
You'll need to give me a source for those numbers. My 1,300 square foot house has a 200 ampere main breaker, so I can't draw more than about 0.024 megawatts. It would therefore take more than two thousand similar-sized houses to draw 53 megawatts—and that's only at full power draw, which I never come remotely close to.
Also it's worth mentioning that timespans don't actually matter here: monthly usage and annual usage are the same number when dealing with watts. When a source says "average annual power consumption", they likely mean that the power measurement is averaged throughout the year and that hot/cold seasons are accounted for.
If you wanted to do math involving time, you would need to use watt-hours (or kWh, MWh, etc.), for which time is a factor. For example, if you drew a constant rate of 1 kilowatt for a full day, you would have 24 hours * 1 kilowatt = 24 kilowatt-hours.
That MW figure has no timescale. it is a peak metric from one instant. 53 MW for one second = ~0.015 kWh 53 MW for one hour = ~53 MWh 53 MW continuously for one day = ~1.26 GWh 53 MW continuously for one year = ~462 GWh There is no guessing as to how often that one datacenter operates at peak power consumption.
53Mw constant utilization is a small datacenter in AI terms