How it works

Water Tracked in the Right Building

Most of a data center's water is consumed at the power plants generating its electricity, not on site. Aquadrio measures that upstream share, hour by hour.

The fact

Where the water goes

A power plant makes electricity by boiling water and cooling what it boils. Some of that water evaporates and leaves the basin for good, before the electricity ever reaches a server hall.

Consumed, not withdrawn. Withdrawn water goes back to the river. Consumed water does not.

~1.18L per kWh
Water consumed making a kilowatt-hour on MISO-Central.
REALEIA-860 2024 cooling codes x EIA-923 2024 net generation
Consumption basis, hydro net reservoir evaporation included. The same figure as ~313 gal/MWh. Other basins, other numbers.
Reservoir evaporation is the contested input here. Charged at zero, the figure reads ~282 gal/MWh instead of ~313.

Why the site meter cannot see it

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.

The method

The measurement and the ceiling

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.

Each hour gets a verdict.

The two gates

Carbon
100 gCO₂/kWh or less
Standard §5.1
Water
Under 1.8 L/kWh at the facility

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.

Limits are set per basin

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.

Put your meters on the record.

Start the process of adding a meter to your facility through a pilot to get your specific hourly vintages on the permanent record.

See the record

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.