Data Center Critics Have Water On The Brain

How many times have you heard that data centers are water hogs and are pushing up electricity costs? What if neither is true?

Take the scary claims about water.

The World Resources Institute says that “recent estimates project that by 2028, AI-related data centers in the U.S. could require up to 32 billion gallons of water annually. This is enough to support roughly 360,000 households’ indoor water use.” (Emphasis in original.)

On its own, that sounds like a scary number.

But our friends at Unleash Prosperity did something few reporting on this issue have bothered to do: they looked at water consumption for other things, such as filling swimming pools, watering golf courses, and growing corn.

Take a look at the chart they put together. It’s truly eye-popping.

Even if that 32 billion number is realistic, it would still 38% less than is used to grow watermelons each year.

And if today’s data center water use (about 17 billion gallons a year) went up 100-fold, it would still be less than we use to water our lawns and for landscaping each year.

And what about the cost imposed on households in the form of higher electricity bills? Yes, data centers do use a lot of electricity.

But if data centers were having a big effect on electricity rates, you’d figure that states with more of them would have higher costs.

Well, Virginia has more than twice as many data centers as California. Yet Virginians pay half as much for electricity as Californians.

Hawaii, the state with the nation’s highest electricity rates, has only nine data centers. Maine, the third most expensive state, has 11.

Turns out that it’s renewable energy mandates, not data centers, that are driving up electricity costs.

A Heritage Foundation report found that eight of the 10 states with the highest electricity costs require that more than a third of their electricity comes from renewable energy.

Only one of the states with the lowest energy bills had any renewable mandate. The one exception is Washington, which is blessed with an abundance of mountains and rivers and gets most of its electricity from hydroelectric plants.

As the Atlantic – which can hardly be described as a right-wing, free-market publication – pointed out last week, “the data-center panic is overblown. Most of the complaints inflate the costs of data centers and overlook the fact that, in some contexts at least, they can bring real benefits.”

It notes that Loudoun County, Virginia, which alone houses more computing power than all of Beijing, raises almost half its property tax revenue from data centers that take up only 3% of its land.

“We’ve been able to build 32 schools and 16 fire stations and six libraries and miles of roads and more than 1,000 acres of parks and recreation, and started an affordable-housing program,” Buddy Rizer, the county’s chief development officer, told the magazine, “all while lowering the tax rate on our citizens.”

You’ll never hear any of this from Bernie Sanders or AOC or any of the other politicians and activists demanding a halt to data center construction.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board