OUR PROPOSED DATA CENTER WILL USE BILLIONS OF GALLONS OF WATER EACH YEAR. YES, BILLIONS.
But don’t take it from us. Let’s hear from our man on the inside, Dr. Curtis Breville of IPE Solutions. He has over 30 years of experience in the data center industry, advising companies and communities on liquid cooling and waste heat reuse. But before you dismiss him as some data center shill, just know that he has been helping us behind the scenes from the very start, and we cannot begin to thank him enough.
We sent Curtis this clip from Compass Datacenters’ presentation to the Topeka City Council, and his response is below:
“Compass is dodging a bigger question with a nuanced answer that doesn’t address the real question. I equate this to a teenager being asked if they were out all night partying with their friends and they saying, “Mom! I was asleep in bed at 7 pm!” They may very well have been asleep at 7 pm, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t wake up at 10, meet up with their friends, and party until 5am. They are dodging the real answer by stating something that doesn’t answer directly.
How much F*#$*ing water do your data centers use!?! That’s the question. Compass is saying, “For cooling purposes? None!” That’s not what was asked.
The real answer is “Billions of gallons of water a year!”
That’s because this 10 building campus that Compass is proposing to put in your backyard is going to use ~600 megawatts of power to run the compute inside of it. That compute uses electricity and electricity is created by water being converted to steam to turn a turbine and create electricity. How much water?
Well, a Berkeley study states, on average, 1.19 gallons of water is needed per kilowatt hour of power generated, and 600 megawatts is equal to 600,000 kilowatts.
600,000 kilowatts x 8,760 hours in a year (24 hours a day x 365 days a year) x 1.19 gallons
That is 6.25 billion gallons per year.
That data center is consuming 17.1 million gallons of water every day just to operate.
The water used on the property of the data center is not the same as the water needed at the power plant to create the electricity for the data center to operate.
The specific question I would ask to get past the double-talk is: When Compass says its facilities use no water for cooling, does that statement include the water consumed in generating the electricity required to operate the IT load and cooling infrastructure? If not, what is the total water-consumption footprint, in gallons per MWh and gallons per year, attributable to electricity consumption at a fully utilized Compass campus?
“We don’t know” isn’t an acceptable answer. They have data centers in multiple locations. What are the total numbers used?
Now…keep this in mind: The amount of water to create electricity differs from one fuel source to another. There’s natural gas, coal, & nuclear power. Each fuel type has a cost associated with it. Kansas has different power plants that feed the grid, so that 6.25 billion gallons of water used isn’t a hard and fast number, but it’s on a scale.
Regardless, we are still in the billions of gallons, whether that is 4 billion or 8 billion…that’s a lot of water when they keep talking about “We don’t use water to cool our facility water systems…closed loop…blah, blah, blah.”