Rising data center demand, driven by the growth of cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence, has begun to strain supplies of power and water around the world. In response, engineers and architects are exploring solutions that leverage proximity to homes and businesses, redoubling the need for community collaboration during planning.
Energy consumption
Today, data centers are responsible for about 1% of global energy-related greenhouse gas emissions. While the sector’s broad decarbonization efforts have limited emissions growth since 2010 to what the International Energy Agency calls “modest” increases, the actual energy consumed by data centers has grown between 20% and 70% from 2015 to 2022 worldwide, according to a 2023 IEA report. Crypto energy use alone has increased by as much as 3,500% during that same period.
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In the U.S., data center energy use more than doubled in the five years leading up to 2023, when it accounted for 4.4% of the country’s total electricity consumption, according to a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report released in December.
“The demand is crazy high for data centers these days, especially after people started using AI,” said architectural designer Samuvel Benhursha, who became interested in data center efficiency during a National Payments Corporation of India project in Hyderabad, India. “Everybody wants AI; there are plenty of startups coming along who want to have AI as their foundation.”
So far, the greater energy demand has been most pronounced in smaller countries. Ireland’s data center electricity use tripled to 18% of the country’s total consumption between 2015 and 2022, according to the IEA. Denmark’s use is expected to increase by a factor of six by 2030, reaching 15% of the country’s total consumption.
Larger countries will also feel the effects soon. The North American bulk power system, which includes the United States and southern Canada, faces “critical reliability challenges” over the next 10 years, according to North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s Long-Term Reliability Assessment released in December. The report called out the size and speed of new data centers – and their increasing use for cryptocurrencies and AI – as one of the major new loads presenting “unique challenges for demand forecasting and planning for system behavior.”
Exacerbating the problem, the increased demand will depend on more variable and weather-dependent power sources, such as solar and wind, continued the NERC report. These renewable power additions are also expected to lag behind the rate of thermal generator retirements.
District heating
One solution to mitigate the swelling demand, says Benhursha, involves integrations with district heating networks, where systems distribute heat to homes and businesses from a centralized heat source.
Instead of reducing a data center’s energy consumption directly, connecting a data center’s cooling system with a district heating network recaptures what would otherwise be lost as waste heat, thereby improving the overall energy efficiency of the data center complex considered together with its surrounding buildings.
Global architecture, engineering, and consultancy company Ramboll designed one such project for a data center in Odense, Denmark. The hyperscale Tietgenbyen data center, owned and operated by Meta, redistributes some 165,000 megawatt hours of energy per year captured from the waste heat of its servers. Peaking at about 25 megawatts per hour, the system heats about 7,000 households in Odense, according to Meta.
While coolant leaving a data center carries a large amount of heat, the heat has a relatively low temperature: about 81 F in Tietgenbyen’s case. So the system first raises that temperature to 158-167 via an adjacent wind-powered ammonia heat pump before sending it to the city. District heating company Fjernvarme Fyn then sends the heat transfer water to homes and other buildings that can route it to radiators for space heating.
But the distance between a data center and a district heating network plays a key role in the feasibility of such a project, according to Ramboll’s website. The farther a data center is, the less feasible heat recovery becomes. That requirement, along with the need to secure sufficient power and water, makes a case for locating data centers closer to city centers, a scenario that Benhursha says will call for greater community engagement.
“This is where some phenomenal architects across the globe are actually coming in,” Benhursha said. “They are saying, ‘Why don’t we make some sort of a park within this data center so that people can come in and so that it doesn’t feel like it’s isolated?’”
Benhursha pointed to a conceptual project called The Spark, designed by a global architecture and design firm, Snøhetta. Beyond district heating integration, The Spark reimagines data centers as the anchors of smart cities, where buildings are placed strategically in relation to data centers based on their heating needs, efficiently extracting the heat from the network.
“Collaboration is the key (to data center design),” Benhursha continued. “Once you have a better collaboration, there's a lot of things that can happen. This includes the people of that community where the project is coming.”
According to the Danish Data Center Industry, 63% of data centers in Denmark plan to use their surplus heat in the near future. But in the U.S., a different regulatory environment adds to the complexity of such projects.
Rasheed Ahmad, Ph.D., P.E., M.ASCE, technical leader in distribution and collection system planning at Black & Veatch, said, “While this is possible in the U.S., the main challenge lies in navigating regulatory agencies and local laws.”
Demand for water
Ahmad also notes that water usage is an area where data centers compete for resources.
U.S. data centers consume more than 400 million gallons of water a day nationally, according to one estimate published in the journal Nature. They use water directly for cooling and indirectly through its role in thermal power generation. While the paper estimated some 57% of coolant is sourced from potable water, other options may curb that demand in the future.
“Data centers can use numerous water supply sources, including potable water, treated effluent, or reclaimed/recycled water,” Ahmad said. “The quality of the cooling water, however, can affect the equipment’s useful life. Reclaimed water, for example, can cause more corrosion, scaling, and microbiological growth in the equipment than does potable water.”
Engineers must therefore thoroughly understand an area’s water supply as they design a new data center, Ahmad adds. Conversations with the local water utility to discover the pH levels, conductivity, total dissolved solids, chlorides, silicon, hardness, alkalinity, microbial counts, and other characteristics will influence what a data center uses as coolant.
Benhursha was also excited by sewer mining, the process of reclaiming wastewater for data center cooling. Companies such as Amazon, Google, and Meta have shared goals to become water positive – where they return more water than they consume to communities – by 2030, and treated wastewater has already found its way into some Amazon and Google data centers.
Looking ahead
The increasing rate of resource consumption by data centers should be understood in the larger context, says the Berkeley Lab report. Electric vehicle adoption, the onshoring of manufacturing, and general electrification of industries, coupled with water infrastructure stressors induced by climate change, will all compete for the same resources over the next few decades.
“Research initiatives are needed not merely to identify strategies to meet data centers’ future energy needs but also to help stakeholders use this relatively near-term electricity demand for data centers as an opportunity to develop the leadership and strategic foundation for an economywide expansion of electricity infrastructure,” the Berkeley Lab team wrote.
