November 26, 2022 08:59
Most tech companies have water management programs classified as underperforming, and many don’t even disclose how much water they use, according to a new study. All as much of the world grapples with the consequences of heatwaves and drying up rivers caused by climate change, and as the western United States experiences the 22nd year of its worst drought in more than a millennium.
“After the summer we’ve had, not just in North America and Europe, but everywhere, it is likely that the companies that manage data centre (data centres) will come under increased scrutiny,” says Kata Molnar of Morningstar Sustainalytics, a Netherlands-based research firm that assesses corporate sustainability, and which conducted the study of 122 large technology companies.
Data centers account for a relatively small percentage of a country’s total water consumption when compared to sectors such as agriculture, power generation, manufacturing and drinking water. However, they come to exploit large amounts of local water resources for their cooling systems, and can use even more if you include the enormous quantities of water required by the hydroelectric plants that produce the electricity necessary to run them.
Stressed water reserves
Northern Virginia’s Data Center Alley is home to the largest park of data centers in the United States: it occupies 390 acres – an area more than 700 American football fields – followed by Northern California’s Silicon Valley, with 62 hectares. But such centers are also springing up in other areas of Arizona, California and Utah, even though some of these states have been victims of droughts for over twenty years.
To understand what the impact of this boom might be on regional water reserves, stressed by heat and drought, it is necessary to have an accurate calculation of the water usually consumed by the plants. Currently, companies in the United States are not required by law to disclose this information, although many have announced plans to do so as part of their water efficiency efforts.
Only 16 percent of data centers have publicly disclosed enough information to calculate water usage for their entire organization
The Morningstar Sustainalytics report focused on companies providing Internet software and services, data processing, enterprise and infrastructure software, and telecommunications services. Included were US companies such as Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Uber and Verizon, as well as Chinese companies such as Alibaba and Baidu. But companies such as Amazon or Meta were excluded because they were classified differently or because the process of assessing their sustainability was still ongoing.
Ambitious programs
The study found that only 16 percent of data center operators have publicly disclosed enough information to calculate water usage for their entire organization. The latter figure was defined as the volume of water withdrawal in cubic meters per million dollars of company revenue.
“If you use this as an indicator of how many companies track their water usage, it could mean that companies do it very little,” says Erin Johnson, of Morningstar sustainalytics. It’s also possible that some companies are tracking their water use without sharing it publicly.
About half of the companies included in the study disclosed information about their water stewardship programs. Of those who shared information, 61 percent received a poor rating, 33 percent an adequate rating, and only 5 percent a positive rating. The evaluations were based on factors such as initiatives, goals and deadlines for reducing freshwater use and regular measurement of water consumption.
Microsoft is the only company to score the highest score, as it reduced overall company-wide water use relative to its annual revenue and took steps to both improve water efficiency and invest in initiatives to replenish water supplies in drought-affected regions where its data centers are located, such as Arizona and Texas. “Most other companies only performed well in one or two areas,” Johnson says.
Although it declined to comment, in April 2022 the company shared data comparing the average efficiency of water use in the regions where its data centers are located: it emerged that the consumption of those in the United States are currently average while those located in regions with higher temperatures, particularly the Asia-Pacific region, require the most water for cooling. Microsoft has pledged to create cooling systems that minimize water usage, such as using outside air instead of water to cool its Arizona facilities when ambient temperatures are below 29 degrees.
Insufficient monitoring
Only 39 percent of operators said they monitor their water use in the 2022 Global data center survey conducted by the Uptime Institute in New York. Most companies that do not track water use have stated that there is no “business rationale” for doing so, i.e. that customers don’t care and that the cost of the water is negligible to them compared to the cost of water. electricity.
Typically a data centre, which can host several thousand servers, can use between eleven and nineteen million liters of water per day, equal to the consumption of a city of between thirty and fifty thousand inhabitants. But data centers hyperscale (enormous in size) owned by tech giants such as Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft contain five thousand or more servers – in some cases hundreds of thousands – and consume much more water.
Data center water efficiency becomes critical as droughts and heat waves recur
The United States has the largest number of data centers in the world, more than 2,700, including nearly half of the hyperscale of the planet. Other countries such as the UK, Germany and China each host fewer than five hundred. Hundreds more plants are under construction around the world as demand continues to grow and reflects a surge in demand for data processing due to an increasing number of people working and interacting remotely. The annual spend of businesses worldwide on services cloud it went from $129.5 billion in 2020 to $200 billion projected by the end of 2022.
There are also other challenges faced by those who want to find out how much water a data center near a city uses. The Oregonian newspaper is currently engaged in a legal battle with the city of The Dalles, Oregon, which is seeking to block efforts to publicize a facility’s water consumption by Google.
The Uptime Institute recommends that data centers keep track of water use, which “is becoming a problem even in relatively low-water-stressed environments.” It also warns that a growing number of communities require centers to be “designed for minimal or near-zero direct water consumption.” This happens, for example, in Arizona, in Chandler, a suburb of Phoenix affected by drought for 23 years now and which is studying more rigorous approval procedures for the construction of new plants.
Efficient water use becomes crucial for the data centers themselves, because extreme heat and drought that can put a strain on both the cooling systems and the electrical networks they rely on, as happened to Twitter in September 2022, when the heat extreme caused the total shutdown of a key data center in Sacramento, California.
Monitoring water use in specific areas where plants are located is critical due to regional differences in water availability, says David Mytton, a sustainability consultant at the Uptime Institute and author of a study on the subject. The plants, in fact, can consume even more water by relying on distant hydroelectric plants, so “the direct consumption of water is much lower than the indirect one necessary for the production of energy”, says Mytton.
To more accurately compare the water and electricity use of data centers with regional availability, some researchers have proposed a measure of water scarcity use effectiveness that evaluates the impact of water consumption of a given facility, both the one on site and the indirect one, on the water availability of your region. A measurement that could help data centers significantly reduce water use in cities like Phoenix, San Francisco and Denver.
“We are moving from simply observing the consumption of the plant to that of the site where the energy is produced,” explains Aaron Wemhoff of Villanova University in Pennsylvania. “And this analysis takes into account the amount of water available where it is consumed.”
(Translation by Federico Ferrone)
This article appeared in the British weekly New Scientist.