Scaling Up! H2o

 Industrial cooling is one of the biggest levers industrial facilities can pull on water use—and it's getting harder to ignore as data centers and other high-heat operations grow. Returning guest Dr. Kelle Zeiher (Project Manager at Garratt Callahan) breaks down what water reuse looks like when you move past slogans and into the realities of pretreatment, concentrate management, footprint, and cost.  Cooling water reuse: the scale of the opportunity  Dr. Zeiher reframes "drought" beyond rainfall, emphasizing aquifer recharge and the limits of focusing only on household restrictions. She contrasts domestic use (~12%) with the much larger share tied to cooling (~50%), then connects that to why optimizing industrial cooling matters—especially when operations sit in arid, desert-like regions with limited water availability. She also shares a data-center statistic that puts "the cloud" into physical terms: ~53 gallons of purified water per gigabyte of data stored to keep environments cool enough for microchips.