Lake Michigan not imperiled by water needs
The biggest data centers planned for Wisconsin, the Microsoft project in Mount Pleasant and the Vantage project in Port Washington, are not a threat to local water systems or to Lake Michigan — a fact opponents either can’t believe or won’t admit.
Microsoft last week called off its plans to develop a second Racine County data center campus in the Village of Caledonia after a public hearing at which one opponent said, “This company, whoever it is, they want our land, they want our water. They have no commitment to our community. They’re in it for profit only.”
In Port Washington, Mayor Ted Neitzke is clearly nettled by the mishmash of false or selectively chosen information about water. The opposition has coalesced, remarkably, around an anti-business video screed by Charlie Berens, a video and standup comedian normally known for his genial takes on Wisconsin culture.
“Wisconsin is becoming a dumping ground for these AI data centers because these tech douchebags know we got a lot of fresh water in the Great Lakes,” he said. “For now.”
The notion has spread. For example, state representative and gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong, a hard-left Madison Democrat, on Wednesday posted on X, “Data centers aren’t just ugly AF — they also guzzle water, hike power bills, and put profits over people.” In an accompanying video, she claimed such centers use “complex cooling mechanisms that require a f— ton more water.”
Neitzke explained the reality.
“I said, ‘Who is Charlie Berens?’, but I met with him for two hours and 20 minutes two weeks ago,” Neitzke told the Badger Institute. “Then I see what he did with it. It’s like the facts don’t seem to matter.”
Early on in the proposals made by Vantage and Microsoft, developers explained that both campuses would be using something called a closed loop cooling system. Rather than perpetually passing cold, fresh water past hot computer units, a closed loop system uses a kind of antifreeze that circulates in the system and is cooled by a chiller.
The evaporative cooling systems used by most older data centers, including Microsoft’s five centers in West Des Moines, Iowa, spend millions of gallons of fresh water that is either lost in evaporation or is reclaimed by the local water utility.
In a closed loop system, no liquid is lost or needs to be replaced. Such systems are heavier on power use but much lighter on water use than open-air evaporative systems.
When the facts of water use were first explained in hearings called last spring to introduce the project, seven people attended, Neitzke said. When they were explained again last month, dozens of residents had expressed their fears of “us sucking all the water out of Lake Michigan.”
The data center will get its water from Lake Michigan, just as Port Washington residents have since 1901. But Vantage’s plan calls for the use of only up to 10,000 gallons of water for the daily operation — not unlike the uses in a factory or an office building, and about the same amount of water used by the people living in 65 homes.
The false narratives pieced together by outside environmental activists and repeated by larger media outlets, however, have not gone away.
The day after Port Washington approved the water extension deal for Vantage, the City of Racine released records that showed Microsoft would need 2.8 million gallons of water in 2026 and that the annual water use could increase to 8.4 million gallons, depending on the scale of its data center expansion.
Those water use numbers have become a kind of drum beat for environmental advocates whose preference would be for no data centers to be built in Wisconsin or anywhere else.
Brad Smith, the President of Microsoft, has responded with some context and perspective.
“It sounds like a big number; 2.8 million gallons,” Smith said, from a transcript obtained by the Badger Institute, “is the amount of water that it would take to build four Olympic-sized swimming pools.
“Just to compare that, when Foxconn was planning to build here, they were permitted to use more than 7 million gallons every day. So, 2.8 million a year is tiny compared to 7.8 million a day.
“Lake Michigan has enough water to fill 2 billion swimming pools. Good news. Lake Michigan has nothing to fear from our data center.”
“We came not because of Lake Michigan, but because of the vision of the village of Mount Pleasant and the ability to buy that land and have it ready for this kind of infrastructure,” Smith said at the expansion announcement.
Data centers in some places use more water than will be needed here.
Microsoft has five data centers and a sixth in the works in West Des Moines, for example. The data centers are regularly the largest single water users in West Des Moines, Christina Murphy, general manager of the West Des Moines Water Works, said.
At their peak usage, the data centers represent between 2 percent and 7 percent of the city’s peak usage, Murphy told the Badger Institute.
“Microsoft has been a good corporate partner,” she added.
Northern Virginia, with the greatest concentration of data centers in the country (more than 250), has had no problem supplying water to them and no violations of water use limits, according to a report by Virginia’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission.
More than 80 percent of the data centers in the state use about 6.7 million gallons of water a year, not per day, the report said. Eleven used more than 50 million gallons a year, but at least as many used less water annually than a typical household, the report said.
Neitzke toured Data Center Alley, as Loudon County, Virginia is known. It helped him see through the water panic. There will, unfortunately, always be Charlie Berenses.
“I just don’t know how I can better communicate it.” he said.
Mark Lisheron is the Managing Editor of the Badger Institute.
Any use or reproduction of Badger Institute articles or photographs requires prior written permission. To request permission to post articles on a website or print copies for distribution, contact Badger Institute Marketing Director Matt Erdman at matt@badgerinstitute.org.
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