Gridwater: The Embedded Water Cost of Electricity

Electrification is on pace to be the great infrastructure project of the 21st century. The water consumed to generate a load of electricity is currently untracked and unattributed. This embedded water — gridwater — represents a large cost that is today invisible and unpriced, and is unattributed to the water basin in which it is consumed. This is driven today by large data center buildouts, and as more energy production and consumption moves onto electric grids, gridwater consumption will continue to increase. As such, more of the world’s water will become gridwater, and is at greater risk of getting lost in our currently inadequate tracking systems. We propose a novel metering and accounting system to track, record, and attribute gridwater to the basin in which it was consumed, and to the hour of electricity that used it. Such a system should be verifiable through recomputation to ensure validity and fidelity for the hourly record it should create. Gridwater consumption must therefore be tracked per-hour and attributed per-basin in order to correctly derive the cost of the embedded water in an hour of electricity.