Data Center Water Usage

Data centers consumed 626 billion liters of water in 2014 and are on track to consume 660 billion liters.

Data center water usage.

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. In 2014 data centers were responsible for 2 percent of all electricity consumed in the us according to the recent government study. 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. Measuring data center water usage.

While this has helped data centers reduce energy consumption quantifying a data center s impact on the environment has to include its water use. 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. This is the ratio between power drawn by the infrastructure components and power delivered to the servers disks and networking equipment ghg protocol 2017. 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.

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. Power usage effectiveness is the metric used to report data center energy efficiency. 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. When people use the internet they rely on a data center to store manage and disseminate information.

Generation of electricity however is a major water consumer and data centers use a lot of electricity. Data centers use a ton of water. 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.