Claims of data center water use are laughably wrong

By Mark Lisheron. He is the Managing Editor of the Badger Institute. Excerpts:

"Early on in the proposals made by Vantage and Microsoft, developers explained that both campuses would be using something called a closed loop cooling system. Rather than perpetually passing cold, fresh water past hot computer units, a closed loop system uses a kind of antifreeze that circulates in the system and is cooled by a chiller.

The evaporative cooling systems used by most older data centers, including Microsoft’s five centers in West Des Moines, Iowa, spend millions of gallons of fresh water that is either lost in evaporation or is reclaimed by the local water utility.

In a closed loop system, no liquid is lost or needs to be replaced. Such systems are heavier on power use but much lighter on water use than open-air evaporative systems."

"The data center will get its water from Lake Michigan, just as Port Washington residents have since 1901. But Vantage’s plan calls for the use of only up to 10,000 gallons of water for the daily operation — not unlike the uses in a factory or an office building, and about the same amount of water used by the people living in 65 homes."

"“It sounds like a big number; 2.8 million gallons [per year],” Smith said, from a transcript obtained by the Badger Institute, “is the amount of water that it would take to build four Olympic-sized swimming pools.

“Just to compare that, when Foxconn was planning to build here, they were permitted to use more than 7 million gallons every day. So, 2.8 million a year is tiny compared to 7.8 million a day.

“Lake Michigan has enough water to fill 2 billion swimming pools. Good news. Lake Michigan has nothing to fear from our data center.”"

"Microsoft has five data centers and a sixth in the works in West Des Moines, for example. The data centers are regularly the largest single water users in West Des Moines, Christina Murphy, general manager of the West Des Moines Water Works, said. 

At their peak usage, the data centers represent between 2 percent and 7 percent of the city’s peak usage, Murphy told the Badger Institute.

“Microsoft has been a good corporate partner,” she added.

Northern Virginia, with the greatest concentration of data centers in the country (more than 250), has had no problem supplying water to them and no violations of water use limits, according to a report by Virginia’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission.

More than 80 percent of the data centers in the state use about 6.7 million gallons of water a year, not per day, the report said. Eleven used more than 50 million gallons a year, but at least as many used less water annually than a typical household, the report said."