The Northern Virginia region is already rife with data centers — and there are many more on the way. Two recent studies offer information about how data centers could potentially create heat islands and affect drinking water supplies.
Heat Islands
One recent study examined the heat that data centers release. It found that they could be creating “heat islands,” which are pockets of higher heat often found in urban areas.
Researchers, including Andrea Marinoni, associate professor with the Earth Observation group at the University of Cambridge, examined historical temperatures around data centers. They looked at 6,000 data centers around the world, including in the Bajio region of Mexico; Aragon, Spain; and the Ceará and Piauí states in Brazil.
The study — which has not yet been peer-reviewed — found that surface temperatures increased by an average of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit after a data center started operating, CNN reported. In the most extreme cases, temperatures spiked by up to 16.4 degrees.
In some cases, these temperature increases impacted areas up to 6.2 miles away.
Potomac River Drinking Supply
Locally, a recent blog post from the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin (ICPRB) examined how data center growth could impact the drinking water supply in the Metropolitan Washington Area (MWA). The research says that future data center growth could potentially “lead to regional water supply reliability challenges.”
Data centers use water primarily to cool their IT systems.
The research stated that current data center water usage is “modest but variable.” Consumptive water use by the buildings is “relatively small within the MWA and is negligible upstream.”
But there is a surge in demand for water during the summer months, when data centers need more water. There’s also competing demand from other uses (such as pools) around that time of year, and river flows are naturally at their lowest in the summer.
Data centers account for only about 1% of total withdrawals from the MWA, but they represent 9% of annual consumptive water use. In the summer, they account for 12% of consumptive water use.
Data centers are continuing to spread, which could drive water usage much higher. The ICPRB post notes that there are more than 100 million square feet of data centers planned for the region. Some of those are “hyperscale facilities with dense server configurations,” which could rely more heavily on water cooling.
Feature image, stock.adobe.com
