Blanket moratoriums and federal mandates aren't the answer to growing concerns about the impact of data center proliferation on local water supplies, according to a report released Monday by a science and technology policy think tank.
"Technology exists, and policy instruments are available, to develop a new, state-led model of water governance for data centers and other large industrial users," noted the report by Robin Gaster, research director of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation 's Center for Clean Energy Innovation.
"What's missing is institutional coordination, regulatory specificity, and a set of standardized mechanisms and metrics," he added.
"You can't fix what you don't measure, and right now nobody measures water consumption the same way on a state or federal level," explained Stuart Lacey, founder and CEO of Labrynth , a global platform for streamlining regulatory, permitting, licensing, and compliance processes for heavily regulated industries.
"State officials, regulators, and communities are all left guessing about storage and consumption," he told TechNewsWorld.
"More than $130 billion in projects got delayed or scrapped in the first quarter of this year, and very little of that was about actual scarcity," he said. "It was about trust, and trust starts with data everyone can see."
The report noted that data centers directly consume only a small fraction of the nation's water supply.
The most widely used estimate of water consumption by data centers is from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which concluded that data centers directly consumed 17.4 billion gallons annually in 2023 and indirectly consumed another 211 billion gallons for electricity production, or 12 times the amount of direct consumption.
All told, it continued, that would amount to less than 1% of total U.S. water consumption.
"Data centers in the United States [directly] consume roughly 17 billion gallons of water per year," said Mark Meckler, president of the Convention of States , a group advocating a convention to amend the Constitution to limit federal power and impose fiscal constraints.
"That's not even a third of a percent of all water usage," he told TechNewsWorld. "By comparison, golf courses consume somewhere between 450 and 500 billion gallons of water. Data centers don't even make a mark in that if you double their water usage."
Gaster noted in a statement that communities are not wrong to be concerned about what large data centers mean for local water supplies, but treating the whole country as if it has the same water problem will produce bad policy.
"Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Virginia face different water realities," he said. "The answer is not to stop data center development. It is to make water impacts visible, measure them consistently, and regulate them where the local watershed actually needs protection."
Meckler asserted that water consumption should be managed at the local level. "If a data center is looking to be sited somewhere, it should be required by local jurisdictions, from the state all the way down to the municipal level, to demonstrate what [the] water usage will be and how it's accounting for it."
Data centers use so much water for the same reason any heat-intensive industrial operation does: they generate enormous amounts of heat that has to go somewhere, explained Whitaker Irvin Jr., president and CEO of Q Hydrogen , a developer of sustainable hydrogen energy technologies…