Opinion: Don’t trade Indiana’s water for data centers
This piece originally appeared in the Hamilton County Reporter.
By Desi Rybolt
Data centers are multiplying across the Midwest as fast as big tech companies are able to buy up land and convince local communities to let them build.
This proliferation has already led to a huge spike in energy costs that’s causing residential customers’ rates to skyrocket.
There are solutions, including battery storage and affordable, available clean energy, that could help mitigate the energy challenge if policymakers pave the way for self-generation and distributed generation.
Unfortunately, data centers are just as water-hungry as they are energy-hungry, but there’s no easy solution to that challenge, which should worry communities across the state.
These massive warehouses of servers depend on enormous amounts of water to stay cool, often hundreds of millions of gallons each year – as much water as a small city. Yet almost no one can tell you exactly how much water they use, how it is sourced, or what safeguards exist to protect communities.
