Data Centers — A Local Drain on Power and Water, Coming to a Community Near You

Map of U.S. data center infrastructure, with the relationship between the data center locations, transmission infrastructure, fiber optic networks and metropolitan areas. Image: National Renewable Energy Lab (United States government work).

TipSheet: Data Centers — A Local Drain on Power and Water, Coming to a Community Near You

By Joseph A. Davis

The internet has become an important part of modern industry, reaching many places, but perhaps in a manner less familiar than your smartphone or laptop.

Data centers. They’re scattered across the continent — possibly near you — and are a relatively new kind of industrial infrastructure that environmental journalists may want to pay attention to.

The lack of black smoke or toxic fumes makes them better than a coal plant or petrochemical refinery, environmentally speaking. But that doesn’t mean they don’t often make big impacts on communities.

 

Why it matters

The most obvious effects are on electric power and water, needed for cooling by many communities during the hot months of summer, when demand is so high that brownouts are a threat (or a reality).

Data centers worsen the problem with their high power demands — which can’t be easily rescheduled.

 

The demand for cooling water can

also present problems in arid areas

or those with limited water supply.

 

The demand for cooling water by data centers can also present problems in arid areas or those with limited water supply.

Meanwhile, journalists too often accept unquestioningly the dictum that anything electrical is clean. That might be true if all your electric power comes from wind turbines and photovoltaics. But it rarely does.

Natural gas and coal-burning power plants may offer quicker solutions when they are already built. So data centers actually do have climate impacts.

 

The backstory

Computer energy needs were huge from the beginning: The ENIAC mainframes of 1945 took up whole rooms — which they heated with banks of glowing vacuum tubes.

There was a time since then when computer programmers prided themselves on writing “elegant” code that was brilliantly efficient and fast. Those were days when the challenge was to write programs that didn’t take days to run.

No more. Today, we have what they call artificial intelligence. One reason AI is often power-hungry is that it uses a “brute force” approach to computing — like trying to master the rules of language by learning everything ever written.

 

Story ideas

• Find the data center(s) nearest you. You might not have to look far — they may already be in the headlines. Ask the PR people for a tour. There are helpful maplike resources from the National Renewable Energy Labs, Datacenters.com and Visual Capitalist.
• What is the power situation in your data center region? Do you ever have brownouts or energy conservation requests during AC season? Talk to your nearby electric utilities about load management.
• What zoning and permits do your burgeoning data centers need in order to build and operate? Have they got all the approvals they need? Did local authorities make any concessions to usual rules? Tax breaks?
• Where does the cooling water for your local data center, if any, come from? Are permits needed? What happens to the water that is discharged, and what are the heat effects on aquatic systems?
• How many jobs will be created during the construction of the data center? How many jobs after it is operating? Can local people fill them?
• Is your planned data center creating its own power plants to operate? Are they fossil-fueled? Green-powered? Nuclear? What are the environmental consequences?

 

Reporting resources

• Data Center Coalition: This trade and lobbying group calls itself “The Voice of the Data Center Industry.”
• Utility companies: Power for many data centers comes from local electric utilities. Check in with your local utilities to see what requirements they have imposed (or waived) for the data center. Here’s a starting list.
• Zoning or planning boards: Siting of industrial facilities often requires approval from such bodies, or city and county councils. Find out what actions are pending and go to the meetings.
• Public utility commissions: Every state has a PUC that regulates local utilities. Check in with your PUC to see if your data center meets requirements. Here’s a list.

[Editor’s Note: For more from SEJournal on AI’s impact, check out a two-parter from EJ Academy on assessing its importance in journalism and teaching, a WatchDog Opinion column on whether AI will make it easier to limit press freedom and a look at how wildfire disinformation, aided by AI, became a state weapon.]

Joseph A. Davis is a freelance writer/editor in Washington, D.C. who has been writing about the environment since 1976. He writes SEJournal Online's TipSheet, Reporter's Toolbox and Issue Backgrounder, and curates SEJ's weekday news headlines service EJToday and @EJTodayNews. Davis also directs SEJ's Freedom of Information Project and writes the WatchDog opinion column.

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* From the weekly news magazine SEJournal Online, Vol. 10, No. 41. Content from each new issue of SEJournal Online is available to the public via the SEJournal Online main page. Subscribe to the e-newsletter here. And see past issues of the SEJournal archived here.