Data Center Water Usage

In this week s voices of the industry earl keisling co founder and ceo of inertech llc the data center infrastructure technology division of aligned energy discusses why data center water use matters and what can be done to make our use of this essential resource sustainable.

Data center water usage.

The lack of detail in microsoft s agreement with goodyear led to initial speculation that the company might be planning more than a data center on the site. Wue water usage effectiveness is a metric developed by the green grid to help data centers measure how much water a facility uses for cooling and other building needs. Power usage effectiveness is the metric used to report data center energy efficiency. When people use the internet they rely on a data center to store manage and disseminate information.

Table 1 compares a typical water cooled chiller system to an air cooled chilled water system in a 1 mw data center assuming that the water cooled chiller plant operates at a pue of 1 6 and the air cooled chiller plant operates at a pue of 1 8 with electric rates at 0 16 kilowatt hour kwh and water rates are 6 unit with one unit being defined as 748 gallons. In 2014 data centers were responsible for 2 percent of all electricity consumed in the us according to the recent government study. In 2019 alone google requested or was granted more than 2 3 billion gallons of water for data centers in three different states according to public records posted online and legal filings. Concentrating many servers inside a single hyperscale data center concentrates water consumption required to cool all those servers in a single watershed exasperating water stress.

While this has helped data centers reduce energy consumption quantifying a data center s impact on the environment has to include its water use. Uptime institute survey data shows that less than one third of data center operators track water usage or use the green grid s water usage effectiveness metric. And according to uptime institute s 2015 data center industry survey in a question asking data center operators about the most important metrics water usage ranked near the bottom of priorities. Digital cryptocurrencies cause similar concerns.

To keep these centers running efficiently a tremendous amount of energy and water are required providing yet another example of the important nexus between water and energy resources. Data centers use a ton of water. Data centers consumed 626 billion liters of water in 2014 and are on track to consume 660 billion liters.