Nothing in the article talks about noise pollution. Their concern is about resource usage - water and electricity.
Now Iowa probably has more water than almost anywhere, but still. Protesting the usage is valid.
So, basically none?
700,000 gallons per acre per growing season for Corn, need to look up cover crop water for a per year figure.
500-2000gallons per pound of beef- and usda estimates place domestic production at 27Billion pounds per year.
We should be good stewards of our clean water (aquafers probably shouldn't be used unless they are of the self-filling variety), nor should down-river be deprived of their share. It's just Water use for forced convection evaporative cooling is not that much in the grand scheme, and most of it is used at the power plant rather than the DC.
You rewrote this comment, again this is very misleading.
My family has grown corn for 140ish years. In that time we have used exactly 0 gallons of water to grow corn. We don't irrigate, we don't have the mechanisms to irrigate, nobody in 100 miles irrigates (they do in far western Iowa and Nebraska and other marginal-to-grow-corn places) 80% of the corn grown in the US is grown with no irrigation.
It rains. That's it.
Even people who irrigate don't use that much water, they supplement the rain.
700,000 gallons per acre per year is the amount of water you'd have to use to grow corn in the desert which nobody does (I'm sure one or two crazies can be found on very small scales)
It is a disingenuous argument made either out of ignorance or manipulation.
So, nothing disingenuous or even really ignorant on my part- just the idea that consistent rainfall can be trusted so much that crop failure due to no rain is an acceptable risk is alien enough it didn't cross my mind... Especially when I was mainly trying to put it in perspective. People space out when Billions come into play. So, I find comparisons with a factor <100 more digestible, and thought I'd share.
We don't have the irrigation hardware, we don't have the wells to irrigate, there is no irrigation.
It's an outrageous claim because it's false.
The folks who do irrigate corn more than a foot per year shouldn't be allowed. It is a huge unnecessary waste of water and we aren't lacking for corn production.
As you have established, eastern Nebraska and western Iowa have an abundance of rain, surface water, and shallow aquifers. Would you then agree that it is a perfectly appropriate place for data centers?
The Ogallala aquifer is dropping considerably and geological processes happen which means even if you stop pulling water out of it it never restores. The most wasteful usages of it (growing corn where it has no business being grown where the majority of the water must come out of the acquirer, data centers that cool from the aquifer, etc) need to be curtailed.
Just because a small minority of people grow corn in the near desert doesn't mean that ALL corn grown is wasteful. Environmental enthusiasts lie with statistics they don't understand and as a result you don't get good environmental policy because too few people who actually understand the situation care to make reasonable choices.
Eating beef pastured on naturally watered land and unirrigated corn has a much different environmental impact than cattle grown on semi-arid-irrigated corn. If you just have "america beef fuk yah" vs. "save muh envroments!" it's just meaningless sectarian strife between fools.
1: A good book about this is "Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains"
They're taking advantage of inappropriately priced industrial water.
Regardless of if it makes sense, that's what they're doing. Using a lot of cold groundwater and then dumping it.
It would be much more expensive to have a closed loop of cooling water (and you're not going to get a lot of cooling on a humid 90 degree Iowa summer day)
People say the same thing about Michigan, yet, here we are
The population in Nunavut is 40,000 vs 10M in Michigan, despite Nunavut being 21x larger than Michigan. That ends up being 0.05/sq mi in Nunavut vs 174/sq mi in Michigan.
Northern Canada is much colder, has more fresh water, and has drastically lower population density, which should make it easier to find an area where people won't complain (other than environmentalists), and they would be able to better leverage nature for most of the year to help with cooling costs.
These are solved problems, I assume it’s just a question of cost and short-term vs long-term thinking.
It seems almost criminal that there are still so many people without safe water, and we’re using billions of gallons for temporary cooling of data centers, just to let it evaporate off.
Using a data center as a heat source for desalination may be another idea, where instead of data centers using fresh water, they could produce it. I looked into it briefly and it sounds like some universities and companies are exploring this. Instead of these data centers causing problems people want to avoid, they could solve problems people already have.
Also Michigan isn't perpetually wet, the summers can get dry at times which means natural sources slow down and ground water recedes and data centers can't/won't scale down utilization based on seasonal conditions. If they end up relying on pulling from ground water, they might not see any limits or problems on their time scales, but 20 years down the road when the local's natural springs and artesian wells stop performing they might get pissed.
All that said, Michigan is pretty good at trying to protect its water, and I expect there to be a decent amount of pushback and opposition to any irresponsible planning with regards to water usage. But on the other hand, we do have a number of corrupt politicians which a big tech company could easily line the pockets of.