- A proposed Google data center in Cedar Rapids could use from 200,000 gallons of water per day to more than 1 million gallons, on average.
- Other Iowa cities with data centers are drawing more water from aquifers and rivers to meet demand.
- A Cedar Rapids data center likely would use at least 25 megawatts of electricity, equivalent to powering about 12,000 homes.
- Alliant Energy, proposing a rate hike not related to the data center, says luring Google would allow the utility to spread future costs over more customers.
In Cedar Rapids, where leaders have approved tax breaks for a proposed Google data center, the top 10 largest water users together now use about 60 percent of the city’s average daily treated water.
If Google comes to town, the share of treated drinking water going to big customers — including ethanol plants, food processors and the data center — could increase to 70 percent or more, given estimates city leaders provided The Gazette.
The city has surplus water capacity, rarely needed except for the hottest weeks of summer, and could drill more wells along the Cedar River to increase the supply. Other Iowa communities with large-scale data centers are planning infrastructure upgrades to pull more water from rivers and aquifers.
“There’s no question these facilities use a significant amount of water,” Cedar Rapids City Manager Jeff Pomeranz said about data centers when he spoke this month to The Gazette’s editorial board.
“When we have a new economic development project, one of the first things we look at is, ‘Can we serve it?’ And if we can’t at this moment or can’t three years from now, what are the improvements that need to be made in order to provide for that need?”
As Google considers whether to build the $576 million data center north of The Eastern Iowa Airport, residents wonder how much water and electricity a data center would use and whether the project would raise residents’ rates or deplete the drinking water supply during a drought.
“As long as we get our normal rainfall, I’m sure there’s enough water in the Cedar River and Cedar River alluvium to support a data center,” State Geologist Keith Schilling said. “It’s the droughts we’ve got to worry about and possibly the capacity of the current city wells to come up with that extra volume.”
What is a data center?
Data centers are fortified warehouses where tech firms house linked computer servers and other hardware that support the applications we use and data we store online.
“All of us have pictures in the cloud, documents in the cloud and, increasingly, we’re accessing artificial intelligence,“ said Jim Martin-Schramm, a policy analyst for Clean Energy Districts of Iowa, a nonprofit that focuses on renewable energy and local ownership. ”I don’t think people really grasp how the convenience of cloud-based computing is linked to massive amount of energy consumption.“
Iowa has at least 26 data centers, but only a few are as large as what Google is proposing in Cedar Rapids. Besides a Google site in Council…
Read More: Google data center would be among Cedar Rapids’ largest water and energy users