this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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If it's just for cooling, wouldn't they just be able to pull water directly from a lake and then return the same water into the lake? Why is any consumption happening?
In theory, yes. Of course, the same holds true for a lot of things which we currently use clean water for! The water needs of agriculture, toilets, carwashes, and many more could be addressed through so-called graywater (e.g.: pumped lakewater, rooftop rainwater) if we really sat down and wanted to make it happen.
The reason that we don't do these things is rather mundane: it's cheaper and easier to tap into the shared drinking water infrastructure than it is to collect your own water and roll your own silos/filtration tech. That might change as the world changes -- something has to give eventually if we use more groundwater than we replenish, but much like clean drinking water, I don't think it's a problem we should ask individual entities to solve. Governments would generally be much more suited to efficiently collecting drainwater, scrubbing it, distributing it, and mandating usage in wasteful commercial applications.
I wonder what the practical implementation would be here. I assume current water infrastructure is two sets of pipes, one for clean water and one for wastewater. Would the solution here be to add a third parallel set of pipes for greywater?
It probably doesn't make sense to do infrastructure -wide duplication for a greywater system. That would be a lot of pipe and possible leaks in places where that resource isn't needed.
Smaller loops make more sense for specific needs like this. It just needs to be legislated - over a certain size, you need to pump, filter if required for your application, and then dump in accordance with whatever rules we set. If local governments want, they can subsidize this through tax breaks - we already have robust systems for giving corporations money back, we just need to tie it to the types of performance we need to see, whether that be environmental improvements, job creation/retention, etc.