A Complex Process Calculation
Mary-Anna Holden is a former New Jersey BPU Commissioner and Butch Howard is a former South Carolina PSC Commissioner.
Data center developers should be required to disclose how much water their proposed projects plan to use, in order to ensure there is sufficient water capacity as well as to help local officials and water managers better plan so customers of all kinds can access sufficient capacity.
Masheika Allgood, an AI Ethicist and founder of AllAI Consulting, LLC, talks about data centers and water scarcity, and another under-discussed data-center issue, noise pollution, in her podcasts and publications, questioning how do we protect our water?
In her recent piece, “There Isn’t Enough Water for All of Us,” Allgood provides sage advice when negotiating data center contracts. What do municipal leaders and investor-owned utilities lack in data to negotiate data center contracts? She questions if local officials have a firm understanding of how much water the data center they are then approving will be required to operate, or how much would be consumed, and will they know this during the permitting and zoning process?
As an old journalism professor of copyediting used to say, “Afraid of Math? Take a number.” We’ll try to simplify Allgood’s writings and calculations as to how to figure out specific water systems’ operational data that generally is unavailable during the planning process, is under no legal obligation to disclose, and is often cloaked in the sphere of proprietary information on data center operation.