SRBC: Data centers can require a lot more water than people realize and where that resource comes from, who it impacts is key variable toward success

​​It only takes a few seconds to ask ChatGPT to map out the best places to stop for tacos on your family’s next road trip, create a new song for the playlist during the drive or suggest the best birthday gift option for your Aunt Myrtle before you arrive at her house and where you can pick it up while avoiding rush-hour traffic.

However, each request of the artificial intelligence generated model can consume some noticeable real-life natural resources, according to Susquehanna River Basin Commission (SRBC) Executive Director Andrew Dehoff.

“If you haven’t heard the recent quip or statistic, one question to ChatGPT can consume upwards of one standard 16-ounce bottle of water,” he said.
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Which can pose a real concern for the multi-state agency that monitors and permits water withdrawal requests within the greater Susquehanna River watershed, especially as mega-companies such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft propose hyperscale data centers within the basin.

What is a hyperscale data center?
Computing and shared cloud storage led to the mass increase for large warehouses of computers to store and process the data from people’s online requests. These data centers are not new and haven’t required a lot of water usage for basic cloud storage and internet storage, according to Dehoff, but the dawn of AI and its extreme popularity has taken this process to new levels.

“So the focus of the hyperscale are essentially these larger campuses where it’s not necessarily one data center, but 10, 15 or 20 buildings that are on the scale of about five acres apiece where all the buildings are full of processors focusing on artificial intelligence,” said Mike College, the Surface Water Supervisor for the SRBC. “The data centers we are seeing now are a hundred if not hundreds of megawatts if not one and a half gigawatts of power. I mean, some of these individual data centers use twice the energy that can be generated at a single average-sized power plant.”

Check out the full interview with Andrew Dehoff and Mike College in the most recent episode of the Middle Susquehanna Riverkeeper Podcast:

​All those processors in a confined warehouse produce quite a bit of heat, according to Dehoff, and it needs to be removed so that servers don’t melt or malfunction.

“It’s going back to physics 101 – water is a great conductor of heat and it is cheap. That’s what our coal power plants have used … that’s what our nuclear power plants use to cool their steam and run their cycles,” he said.

For the longest time, the process has been to use water to exchange the heat and then dump that hot water back into the environment – following appropriate rules about temperatures and being mindful of environmental impacts, Dehoff added.

“As we’re seeing what the demand for cooling is (for new data centers) and what that translates to in terms of water needs, there are some that are projected to consume five million gallons a day, which is a lot bigger than a small power plant,” he said.

​Context and calculations
Currently in Pennsylvania, power generation is the biggest water consumer along our waterways, according to Dehoff, with domestic drinking water supplies (public water for larger towns) next on the list, although “that water is largely returned after it is used and treated back to water quality standards, so there is no real loss to the waters of the basin, where power plants typically evaporate the water.”

But it is important, he added, to consider scale.

“Our nuclear power plants consume tens of millions of gallons a day, close to 100 million gallons a day – over 100 million collectively – which seems like a lot, but they’re positioned on the river, which can usually accommodate that,” Dehoff said. “Conversely, a withdrawal of 100,000 gallons a day may not seem like a lot, but if it is in a small watershed, that could have a much more serious impact to the local aquatic environment.”

Of course, this all depends on weather patterns and water availability as well as, College suggested, the complex math of factoring in other industrial water withdrawal permits and requests in the nearby watershed.

“That’s a huge part of what we look at when considering a project – first we consider it on an individual level and the impact of the project, but then also the impact cumulatively with all the other projects both upstream and operating downstream,” he said. “So you could have a 100,000 gallon a day withdrawal in a fairly large watershed, but if there’s already significant other water use within that watershed, how do all those projects operate together?”

Additionally, certain industries are much more seasonal, Dehoff added.

“Ski resorts don’t make snow in July and golf courses don’t irrigate in March,” he said. “There are other industries that are fairly consistent throughout the year, and then there are those that are sporadic and a little less predictable, such as the natural gas industry, which may have heavy use in a watershed for a short period of time and then shift activities somewhere else.”

Of course, the compounding concern with data centers is that they require such a massive amount of electricity, meaning they typically need to be located near power plants that already are drawing the largest amounts of water from the environment and then have their own high-volume needs.

“Really with every data center request, there are two main aspects. One is the water use of the data center itself, how it goes about cooling, and there are a few ways that can be approached, but then the bigger question is that the new electricity demand coming into the grid, where’s that power coming from?” College asked. “And how is that plant generating electricity and what’s its cooling method?”

There are new cooling methods developing for both power plants and data centers, but ultimately, if these facilities are co-located, “they could have a more significant impact at that location.”

Which highlights the biggest concern for those trying to juggle multiple predictions and permit requests on tight deadlines at the SRBC.

“If a data center is proposed, water is often one of the last considerations in whether a site is appropriate and can support a data center or not,” Dehoff said. “They typically look at other things like electric transmission lines and highways and labor availability and pick a site and sometimes commit to it, and only then do they say, ‘Well, we need water for cooling. What cooling technology are we going to use and where are we going to get the water?’”

​Cooling options
While data centers represent a new industry for the SRBC, cooling methods in general are not, as power plants have employed a variety of cooling technologies over the years, according to College.

“If you go back 30 or 40 years, the primary method was called once-through cooling, where large quantities of water on a scale of hundreds of millions of gallons a day would be withdrawn, heated slightly where it is absorbing that waste heat from the facility and then discharged back into the water source,” he said.

Over the years, that has evolved into evaporative cooling, where there is still a fairly large amount of water withdrawn, and through the process of cooling, the water is absorbed and evaporates.

“More recently, especially with power plants, we’ve seen dry cooling methods, where rather than using water to absorb that heat, it is using ambient air and a system with large fans similar to how a car radiator would work, pulling away the heat and dissipating the heat into the environment,” said College. “There’s also hybrid systems that use a mix of dry and evaporative cooling.”

As with anything, there are pros and cons to each method, he added.

“Once-through is a historic method that isn’t viable today. Evaporative cooling uses a larger quantity of water, but it is more energy efficient in terms of electricity that’s consumed for the heat that’s being dissipated,” College said. “Dry cooling uses significantly less water, but from what we’ve been hearing and reading, there’s an energy penalty where it requires more energy to have that same amount of cooling to be achieved. The dynamic then becomes figuring out the balancing point. When are those penalties occurring? To what degree? How significant are they occurring?”

It creates a unique dilemma that Dehoff is anxious to see play out because it will have a direct impact on decisions the SRBC will be making long-term.

“Despite the ‘energy penalty’ – as Mike called it – are companies willing to consider some of the more water-efficient methods even if it means they are less energy efficient?” he wondered.

So far, within the power generation industry, that cooling process transition has been an evolutionary event, College added.

“At this point, I think we have four dry-cooling, combined cycle natural gas power plants within the basin that have been operating for over seven years very successfully,” he said. “From what we’ve been hearing, there are very early conversations on data centers and their starting point is generally a hybrid system where they’d be using water to cool for evaporation in the summer, but during the fall, winter and early spring months, they may not need significant water use at all – they’re using dry-cooling, ambient air, taking advantage of the climate we have.”

“Unfortunately,” Dehoff added, “Summer is when water demands tend to be the highest across the board and when you tend to get droughts and when availability is the lowest.”
 
Assessing the region
There are a lot of reasons the Susquehanna River basin is optimal for data center consideration, but there is a lot of activity in other places, Dehoff admitted, including Northern Virginia, Atlanta and Texas.

“There are a lot of eyes on PA right now, especially the Susquehanna, and a lot of what I’m hearing is that is due to land availability, the impression that we have ample water supplies, which implies that these groups know they need it for cooling,” he said. “We’re also close to natural gas.”

“It is definitely outside of our area of expertise, but our area does offer proximity to various population centers, water availability, skilled workforces and natural gas production,” College agreed. “But again, it isn’t just in our basin. Other areas are looking at similar development rates.”

Learning from those that have dabbled in the data center world longer, Dehoff suggested there is definitely a warning to consider.

“It doesn’t take long to build a data center – it’s basically a warehouse that you stock with a bunch of processors,” he said. “However, it can take a long time to develop, let’s stay, five million gallons a day of water supply through permitting, locating and securing the infrastructure. So, there’s a disparity there in terms of there’s a rush to get the data centers built, but frustration and delay and anxiety of the water suppliers or the water managers of how that demand is going to be met in a timely fashion, if it can be met the way they want to meet it.”

The greater Susquehanna River basin itself provides a wide variety of different environments, and not all are suitable for data centers, especially when factoring in impacts to other local industries, homeowners, etc., Dehoff admitted.

“I think it is a matter of scale. Some of the quantities we are hearing – like I cited, five million gallons a day – that’s a significant introduction of new water demand in a small area. Most towns don’t consume that, our larger cities do,” he said.

“If you’re looking to build a data center in a farm field surrounded by rural homes that have their own supply wells and hoping to get four to five million gallons a day out of new wells, that is not something we've seen,” he said. “That would be a challenge and that is something we're trying to avoid because not only would the sourcing be an issue, the time to develop it would be significant and there would be serious concerns raised about the impacts of the availability (of water) to existing local users.”

Success means focusing on water early
While there is a massive push to quickly place data centers across the region, Dehoff relayed that the major players – including Amazon, Microsoft and Google – have shown an interest in being sustainably sound resources within the communities they join.

“The term they use is ‘water-positive’ or – essentially – returning more water to the community than they’re taking out of it,” he said. “And I think that can take many forms, such as treating poor water quality like some of our mine drainage water as a trade-off for using our water. So, I think there are opportunities there.”

Although some of the concerns come with less-reputable options.

“There seem to be, I don’t know if they’re independent developers or speculators, but you know they’re not the only ones proposing data centers,” Dehoff said. “I don’t know if those speculators have given the same thought to water.”
Dehoff did admit that the SRBC has implemented policies and strategies to encourage and offer incentives for water saving technologies “ranging from expedited reviews to reduced fees and we’ve been very successful.”

In cases where the SRBC has seen success with cooling systems in gas-fired power plants, it usually is when water is a part of the conversation early in the process, according to College.

“So about eight years ago, there was a significant increase in natural gas power plant development within the basin. We would hear different things from different developers where some would say that evaporative cooling is the only viable method, and then we'd have developers that would come in from Day One and say they were proposing dry cooling,” said College. 

“We worked with the project sponsors to try and understand what those differences were, and we found that in some cases, even if there is the asserted efficiency penalty using dry cooling, the siting flexibility would more than offset that. Where if you're building a power plant, you need fuel coming in, electricity going out and if it's evaporative cooling, you need a significant amount of water. If you're looking at dry cooling, you only need the intersection of two things where it's fuel in and electricity out.”

So, they quickly identified a variety of pros and cons to each system based on where they were located, and the SRBC adopted a resolution encouraging the consideration of dry cooling, not mandating it.

“One of the main things that we're looking to avoid is a project coming in, being committed to a specific site, and then the conversation comes up about water or availability or what that balance is,” said College. “When perhaps changing to a different cooling system would have offered opportunities to pick a better site. So what we're trying to do is avoid those missed opportunities.”

And improve water-related issues where possible, Dehoff added.

“So if these places could work cooperatively with local water suppliers who have infrastructure needs, like leaking pipes, for example. We have systems that have leaks where up to 50 percent of their water is being lost, and if they could help address that, then it could help free up water for other uses or the environment,” he said.

“So, again, it really comes down to raising awareness of the need to consider water early and looking at opportunities to do it in a cooperative and sustainable fashion, either through choosing the best sources or partnering through the needs of a local community or the environment, such as abandoned mine drainage.”
 
Emerging evolution
While data centers are an emerging industry to the SRBC, the concept of dealing with emerging industries as a whole isn’t new to the commission, according to College.

“You go back eight years, it was a significant influx in natural gas power plant development. You go back eight years before that, and it was the Marcellus natural gas development industry itself,” he said. “Over time, the industries continue to evolve. And as new industries come up, we do our best to learn as much as we can and work with all of our partners and the industries and NGOs to see what's the best path forward. So, while data centers are new, new things unto themselves aren't new.”

In fact, there are a lot of similarities to and the SRBC is better equipped to deal with data centers, according to Dehoff, because of the fracking industry.

“They're similar in the fact that there's a lot of uncertainty. There's a lot of urgency, apparently, in getting water supplies in place, sometimes faster than we can handle it or that they can reasonably be developed just feasibility-wise. It's really spread out,” he said. “In the early days of fracking, appropriate sourcing of water was not always a first consideration, but we threw in incentives and other encouragements and got to the point where the main sources of water for fracking are sustainable like the Susquehanna River, the West Branch or impaired sources.”

One major difference in the industries is that there aren’t any real alternatives to using water in fracking like there is for using water in cooling data centers.

“They needed water. There were different abilities to recycle and reuse and some treatment plants did pop up to treat and reuse fracking,” said Dehoff. “But there are a lot more opportunities, I think, for data centers for alternative methods for cooling, and creative improvements to help a site.”

Even the small tweaks can help, College added.
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“Other conversations we’re having as projects come up are what are some of those 1 percent improvements that could be done for a site that add up?” he asked. “Are they capturing stormwater? Are there other opportunities there that while there is no silver bullet, what are things that could be done to round off some of the edges for potential positive impacts?” 

Learn more about the Susquehanna River Basin Commission and its work with water withdrawal permitting and more at www.srbc.gov