If, in an ordinary day, an Eastern Michigan University student joined an online class on Zoom, wrote up a paper in Google Docs and turned it in on Canvas before unwinding with some Fortnite and Netflix, that student may have utilized data center technology at least five times in a single day.
In recent years, data centers, such as the ones that run foundational infrastructures like Amazon Web Services, have become an increasingly contentious issue in communities around the country. Residents and legislators in Ypsilanti, for example, have spent over a year considering, and often explicitly opposing one being planned by the University of Michigan and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
IBM defines a data center as "a physical room, building or facility that houses IT infrastructure for building, running and delivering applications and services," and storing related data.
Data centers can vary substantively in the technology they use. As the field continues to evolve, some environmental experts and activists have been weighing its potential risks and benefits.
During community discussions about data centers, two commonly raised concerns have been water usage for cooling and energy usage for power.
Christopher Gellasch is an environmental scientist who teaches hydrogeology, among other topics, at EMU. As a researcher, his work focuses on issues like water quality and groundwater.
Gellasch said during an interview with The Eastern Echo that making good decisions about data centers depends on community members being informed on the details.
When it comes to water usage and cooling, Gellasch compared facilities that dispose of water through evaporation with ones that use what is often referred to as a closed-loop system.
Gellasch said that the cool groundwater used in a closed-loop system can be cycled back through the ground repeatedly.
"You can keep doing this over and over and over again," Gellasch said. "It's not going to warm up the subsurface. So those (closed-loop facilities) are going to be a little bit better in terms of the water use."
Gellasch also said that hyperscale data centers can be viewed as large industrial complexes that, like other facilities in that category, may burn fossil fuels and impact demand on the power grid.
In local discussions about data centers in Ypsilanti, residents have raised concerns about both the logistical impacts on local utilities as well as the environmental impacts of the technology itself.
Peter Sinclair is an environmental activist and videographer who has studied climate science since the 1970s. In recent years, he said he has taken a particular interest in the adoption of clean energy.
During an interview with The Eastern Echo, Sinclair acknowledged that some facilities, like the one owned by Meta in Mansfield, Georgia, have led to harmful environmental impacts, but suggested that communities, through informed advocacy, could benefit from a large entity offloading utility rates and subsidizing better infrastructure for the community.
Gellasch and Sinclair both spoke about various risks involved in data center technology, but also shared the conclusion that it is unrealistic to reject it entirely.
"Pandora's box is open, and we're going to have to get a handle on it, just as we have with a lot of other dangerous and challenging technologies," Sinclair said when speaking about the technology behind artificial intelligence. "There has to be room to go as far and as fast as possible to regulate and mitigate the harms. But to just say, we're going to opt out of some technology that is out of the bag and is everywhere, I don't know of any time in human history where that's been a viable path."
Sinclair said that one potential benefit that communities might stand to gain from data center development agreements is the creation of new energy infrastructure. As one example, he pointed to the decentralized networks of small backup batteries at small businesses and homes known as virtual power plants.
Virtual power plants were also mentioned during webinar hosted by the Washtenaw County Democratic Party, where Missy Staltz, sustainability and innovations director for the City of Ann Arbor, suggested a vertical data center design that could be used to generate heat for the city.
Piggybacking community benefits onto development deals was a recurring topic on the panel, where Sinclair played a clip from a WKAR interview with Sean McBrearty that he said he mostly agreed with. McBrearty is the Michigan director of Clean Water Action.
"This doesn't have to be an environmental problem," McBrearty had said. "We can make choices to regulate data centers responsibly and turn this into something that's no longer an issue. Make this a benefit for our communities instead of a tax on regular folks."
Various regulatory strategies to protect community interests were proposed during the panel, which also featured Amanda Robert, the network director for the Michigan Climate Action Network and Ben Poulson, the state government affairs director for the Michigan League of Conservation Voters. Some of the examples included locking developers into long, multi-year commitments to avoid project abandonment, passing local moratoriums to buy time and requiring subsidization of community resources.
Sinclair told The Echo that one potential benefit for communities is the addition of subsidized clean energy infrastructure into the power grid. To that point, he referenced Google's Project Cannoli – a data center being proposed for Van Buren Charter Township that Google has pledged 2.7 gigawats of new grid resources for, including solar-power technology. The tech company has also committed to fully funding its own energy usage.
Gellasch explained a similar concept related to water usage, which has decreased in recent decades due to household and overall demand decreasing as things like toilets have become more water efficient.
"These water utilities still have to maintain all this infrastructure," Gellasch said. "So one of the problems they run into is that they're not charging as much because they're not selling as much water to people."
When a large customer like a hyperscale data developer pays to use a local water utility, he said that there is potential for that community to benefit "because now the water utility has more money to fix water mains and upgrade any treatment plants or anything else that's going on."
Sinclair told The Echo that water pollution, like the rise of energy and water rates, was not necessarily an inevitable byproduct of data center operations, based on how a given developer handles its project.
During the panel, Robert said that air quality, in addition to water and energy, was a commonly-raised community concern that deserved attention. Gellasch explained during his interview that air impacts from data centers primarily come from backup generators, which are often powered by natural gas and produce air emissions on site.
The Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, is the main regulatory body responsible for controlling air quality in the state, and Gellasch said that EGLE's air permitting process would be relevant when it comes to data center emissions.
Overall, Gellasch said that communities should be making informed decisions when it comes to data centers that are being proposed for their communities.
"As a society, you have to figure out, what are the benefits, and what are the costs, and then make that value judgment," Gellasch said.
Similarly, Sinclair said in his interview that community concerns about electric rates and demand, water and potential climate impacts were legitimate, and that it was good for people to get involved in a way that is informed, unbiased and not demonizing of the people involved in development.
"The question is not, are we going to have data centers, it is, how can we coexist?" Sinclair said. "If you are in a community that is considering a data center, then that's a tremendous opportunity to first of all, tell (the developer) what you are requiring of them and ask that they provide a whole lot of benefits to your community."
