Ohio · Data centers and water · Detailed calculator

What Would a Data Center Use?

Type in a city, village, township or county in Ohio to see its water system and the streams it drains to. Then size a data center below and see roughly how much water it could use there, depending on how it's cooled.

This is the detailed calculator, with every range and chart. The simple view shows the same estimates in pictures.

Your city, village, township or county

Ohio proposals

What's been proposed

Projects that have come up at public meetings or in the local news. If the company or the utility has put out a water number, it's listed with where it came from. Open a project to compare that number with our estimate.

See the proposals on a map · Moratoria.

Ohio actions

What Governments Have Done

Who decides

Three different bodies decide the water questions

Your township or city

Rezoning, special land use and site plans. Can attach conditions, adopt a moratorium, and write water standards into its ordinance.

Your water and sewer utility

Whether it can serve the project within its plant capacity and wholesale contracts, and what the site may discharge to the sewer.

The state (EGLE)

Large withdrawals from wells (registration at 100,000 gallons a day, permits above 2 million), direct discharges, wetlands and floodplains.

Methods and sources

How the numbers are made

The model turns the computers' heat into evaporation, hour by hour, using 30 years of weather from eight places in Michigan and the methods in published studies. We don't know each project's exact design, so every estimate is run 200 times with different settings. The big number is the middle result; the range covers the middle 80%. Place information comes from Census, EPA, USGS, NOAA and EGLE. The methods page has the details, the checks against real data, and a log of changes.

The calculator covers the campus's water, electricity and runoff on the site. It does not count new water or sewer connections, power lines, access roads or other construction beyond the site.

Where the energy and water go

Drawing, not to scale. It shows every path at once; a real campus has some of them, by its cooling design and the weather. Closed loop has no cooling tower and evaporates almost nothing, and cooling towers evaporate all year. Everything is accounted for. Water taken plus condensate equals water evaporated or lost plus wastewater. Electricity plus the heat in outside air equals the heat leaving as warm air and evaporation. Power plants also evaporate water, off site, to generate this electricity and what the lines lose on the way; that water is shown separately. The full balances and equations are on the methods page.

Water taken	What the campus draws from a water system, wells or a lake.
Evaporation	Water that cools by turning to vapor. It leaves as vapor and does not come back here.
Drift	Droplets carried out of a cooling tower in the air.
Blowdown	Water drained from a cooling tower to keep minerals from building up.
Leaks	Small losses from a closed loop, replaced with new water.
Outside air	A little air brought in to ventilate the building. It brings heat and moisture with it.
Humidifiers	Add moisture in very dry winter air. Not every campus has them.
Condensate	Water a coil removes from humid outside air. It comes from the air, so it joins the wastewater without being taken from a water system.
PUE	All the campus's electricity divided by what the computers use.

Corrections

Suggest a correction

If something here is wrong or out of date, tell us. We read every one, and any change goes in the log on the methods page with the date and the reason.