Data center cooling choices shift water impacts across the grid: An integrated water-energy model for sustainable data center development

Abstract

Data centers are being developed at an unprecedented pace, yet their energy and water impacts, and the spatial and temporal distribution of these impacts, remain poorly characterized. Data centers consume water for cooling (direct) and through electricity generation (indirect). Decisions on siting and cooling technology result in water-energy trade-offs that extend impacts beyond the facility's location. Existing assessment frameworks rely on facility efficiency metrics and average grid water intensity factors, suppressing the temporal impacts of data center load and generation availability. They also attribute indirect consumption to the facility's location rather than to the generators (and corresponding hydrologic regions) that respond to the added load, misattributing spatial impacts. To close this gap, we develop a computational model of the data center-energy-water nexus that links facility cooling and electricity demand with hourly economic dispatch, generator-level water consumption, and monthly subbasin depletion. Built on open-source data, the model resolves where and when water is consumed, and where this consumption compounds existing water risk or creates new risk. Using the model, we study different cooling configurations and proposed developments in the state of Michigan. Air-cooled data centers halve total water consumption relative to evaporative cooling, but increase electricity demand and raise indirect water consumption by one-third, shifting the water footprint from the facility to generators. Mapping these changes to subbasins reveals depletion increases beyond the data center sites, in regions that facility-level reporting may overlook. These results show that data center water and energy impacts cannot be assessed in isolation, motivating the need for integrated modeling to inform siting, design, and reporting practices.