People are worried about new data centers. These centers use huge amounts of energy, and their cooling requires tremendous amounts of water. Yet, these data centers are part of modern life.
They are vital to the internet – and almost everyone uses them. If you use email, have a smartphone, or ever search the web, you use them. If you are a gamer or buy anything online – you use them. If you put information in the cloud, you use them.
These days, even simple web inquiries often use artificial intelligence (AI), a heavy user of data centers. AI tells me that they consume 1-2 percent of the world’s total electricity! While that’s a number that is unreliable without confirmation, it’s clear that data centers are used almost everywhere by almost everyone.
It’s also clear that almost no one wants to live near one, as they are not pretty, are noisy, and damage the local environment. They do bring some benefits to a community, as they provide jobs and tax revenue. Local politicians often look favorably at data centers while many residents are strongly opposed.
A concern is that the huge amounts of energy used by data centers will result in higher electricity bills. If a data center gets its power from the grid, the electrical utility needs to generate more. It also may need to upgrade and enlarge its distribution system. These things are expensive – will they result in increased electricity rates to everyone?
One response has been to demand that data centers produce their own electricity. Appalachian Power recently agreed to the “White House Ratepayer Protection Pledge,” promising that data centers need to develop and pay for their own energy production. Who is ultimately going to pay for these new energy production facilities? Will it be the investors in the data centers? They certainly wouldn’t like that as it could drive their return on investment down. Will it be the users of the data center services – will we see price increases in things we all use every day? And where will the new energy come from anyway? There is no such thing as a free (energy) lunch – someone needs to pay.
In the short term, it seems as if new sources of energy must come from either renewables (particularly solar) or natural gas. Of course, we experienced locally the construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline. Not many people want another gas pipeline built through their neighborhoods. And not many people want more noise and air pollution from gas turbines.
There is opposition to solar too – often based on hurting agriculture. Using farmland for solar energy has been estimated to be about 100 times more efficient than using it to grow corn for ethanol fuel production. In other words, 100 acres dedicated to corn for energy production is matched by only one acre dedicated to solar production. One way to protect farmlands for food production is to stop growing corn to produce ethanol and instead convert a tiny fraction of that land to produce electricity. There is money to be made from harvesting energy!
Moving the responsibility of producing energy for data centers from the utilities to the data center companies is not going to save us money – it will just shift costs around. Perhaps more important are the land use changes needed to produce additional energy. Does anyone want a nuclear power plant in their backyard?
