Data centers are booming. But there are big energy and environmental risks

What’s driving the local pushback against data centers?

Some people don’t want huge industrial facilities — and all the noise and light that comes with them — changing the character of their community.

But people are also concerned about data centers depleting local water supplies for their cooling systems, driving up electricity bills and worsening climate change if the facilities rely on fossil fuel power plants for the electricity they need. The IEA says climate pollution from the power plants that run data centers could more than double by 2035.

Consider what’s happening around the Great Lakes, where Scanlan of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee says there’s a flurry of data center activity. The Great Lakes can be thought of as “a giant pitcher of water with straws going into it” from water utilities, business and power plants in eight states and two Canadian provinces, Scanlan says. The question is, how much more water can the lakes provide for data centers and the power plants needed to run them in the coming years?

In Georgia, some residents reported problems getting drinking water from their wells after a data center was built nearby. And in Arizona, some cities have restricted water deliveries to facilities that use a lot of water, including data centers.

Dan Diorio, vice president of state policy at the Data Center Coalition, an industry group, says companies have been working to reduce how much water their facilities consume. While some data centers use evaporative cooling systems in which water is lost as steam, others rely on closed-loop systems that use less water. A Google data center in Georgia uses treated wastewater for cooling and then returns it to the Chattahoochee River, Diorio said. And there’s a push for waterless cooling systems.

“It’s a balance between water and electricity,” Diorio says. “If you use more electricity to cool, you’re going to use less water. If you use more water, you’ll use less electricity.”

Rising electricity bills are also a major concern as data centers spike power demand in certain areas. An analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists recently found that in 2024, homes and businesses in Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia faced $4.3 billion in additional costs from transmission projects that were needed to deliver power to data centers.

Diorio says the data center industry “is fully committed to paying its full cost of service for electricity.”
Data centers aren’t the only source of new power demand. The construction of factories and increased sales of electric vehicles and home appliances like electric stoves are also increasing the country’s electricity needs.

Compounding the concerns of data centers’ environmental and economic impacts is frustration that tech companies aren’t forthcoming about their operations. Without more transparency around water and energy consumption, Scanlan says the public doesn’t have the information it needs to…