At least the first of three planned buildings on Google’s data center campus in Botetourt County will use air-cooling technology, instead of water, the tech company has announced via the county’s website.
The announcement, released as drought conditions persist in Southwest Virginia and residents continue to protest the data centers’ construction, “is driven by business demand and infrastructure requirements for the project,” the county posted this week on the recent updates section of its data center website.
The Southwest Virginia Data Center Transparency Alliance, a citizens group that has coalesced in opposition to the development, said in a Wednesday statement that Google is “bowing to public pressure” with its announcement, but the group remains skeptical.
The cooling technology for the other two planned buildings “remains under active evaluation,” according to the Botetourt County post.
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It is unclear what impact an air-cooling system would have on the project’s overall water demand, according to a spokesperson for the Western Virginia Water Authority.
An agreement between Botetourt and the authority states that an estimated 2 million gallons of water could be used per day in the beginning of the project, and, with potential expansions of the project, rise up to 8 million gallons per day.
In response to written questions from the transparency alliance’s Ben Verschoor, water authority Executive Director Michael McEvoy earlier this month wrote that while daily usage will vary seasonally, he expects the annual average to be close to 1.2 million gallons of water per day.
In his July 16 reply to Verschoor, which he provided to Cardinal News, McEvoy wrote that it would be at the water authority’s discretion as to whether it would provide the additional 6 million gallons.
That exchange came before Google’s announcement. Though a decrease in consumption would be expected given the change to air cooling for a building, the water authority has received no updated figures, and the previous agreement stands, water authority spokeswoman Sarah Baumgardner said Thursday.
Google said in the announcement that it will continue to work with the water authority “to focus on minimizing water usage and maintaining the highest levels of sustainability in the industry.”
In the Southwest Virginia Data Center Transparency Alliance news release, group co-founder Julie Bivins said many questions and concerns remain unanswered.
“Also, the current performance agreement still stands, stating that Google is allowed to use up to 8 million gallons per day (MGD) of water at full build-out,” Bivins said in the news release. “Until that contract changes, I’m not sure that an announcement stating something different actually means anything.”
The 312-acre Google campus at Greenfield Industrial Park also will include three substations, an office building, access roads, utilities, parking areas and stormwater management facilities, according to an Army Corps of Engineers notice soliciting public comment on the project.
While it’s unclear yet how the announced cooling change might impact water demand, the electricity required for air cooling typically places an increased demand on the power grid, according to multiple sources. Like a home computer with a fan that cools it, large racks of servers and other IT gear need cooling as well, to prevent breakdowns that could include fires.
U.S. data centers in 2023 were responsible for about 4.4% of the nation’s electricity consumption, using about 176 terawatt hours, or 1 trillion watt hours, according to a congressional report. About half of that came from operating the internet technology equipment inside, while cooling accounted for at least 40% of the remaining power use.
Research by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, published in 2022, determined that a transition from 100% air cooling to 25% air and 75% liquid reduced a facility’s power use by 27%.
“Increasing the percentage of liquid cooling contribution significantly diminishes the power intake which addresses concerns about natural resources limit as one of the most critical requirements of a sustainable design,” the ASME study’s authors wrote.
Many data center developers and suppliers seem to prefer liquid cooling. A report from energy management company Eaton says that liquid cooling adoption has gained momentum as a more efficient method, particularly with high-density information technology racks. Another report, from server supplier Supermicro, noted both energy consumption concerns and increased noise.
According to an article in the online version of science journal Nature, all U.S. data centers combined early in the decade to consume about 449 million gallons of water per day, compared to the total daily U.S. consumption level, 322 billion gallons, but “there are issues of transparency with less than a third of data centre operators measuring water consumption.”
Google, which has data centers in about 60 locations worldwide, does not list how many of them use air cooling.
“Water cooling is generally more energy-efficient than air cooling, but with every campus, we ask an important question: Is it environmentally responsible to use water to cool our data center?” the company wrote on its website.
