Drinking water and data centres: 10 billion litres of H2O, floods of sewage and our legal challenge to the biggest centre in planning permission in the UK
Foxglove has worked with The Times newspaper to expose the scale of the critical knowledge gap facing the UK over the gigantic use of drinking water by new hyperscale data centres. We have launched a new challenge against the construction of a data centre where the water problem looks particularly bad – and pretty disgusting.
We revealed the water supplier for what would be the largest data centre in the UK going through planning permission, at Elsham in North Lincolnshire, has warned it could cause a risk of floods of sewage into the local area.
In its submission to the local council opposing the building of the new data centre, Anglian Water added that it could lead to “a deterioration in water quality” and an “unacceptable risk” of breaking environment laws.
The water company wasn’t only concerned about the data centre’s potential to pollute the water supply and flood the region with sewage – but also about its ability to provide enough water to supply the data centre’s cooling needs.
Specifically, Anglian Water warned that its supply limit per day for non-domestic customers – like data centres – is 20,000 litres per building per day. Anglian’s neighbouring water company Thames has said that hyperscale data centres use between 4-19m litres of water per day for cooling.
Clearly, the 20k litres maximum Anglian says they can supply per day would be nowhere near enough to supply that level of water demand – and Elsham has been billed as the biggest new data centre in the country, which would presumably put it at the top end of Thames’s estimate for water consumption.
Floods of sewage hitting North Lincolnshire is a pretty effective (and pretty gross) symbol of the damage that the massive water consumption of hyperscale new data centres could do to our network and supply of clean drinking water.
Foxglove and Global Action Plan have made a formal submission to North Lincolnshire Council opposing the construction of a new data centre at Elsham. Our objections focused (unsurprisingly) on water consumption, but also power consumption and projected CO2 emissions. You can read the full submission here.
Previous to the July 28 story, we worked with The Times on an investigation that revealed the UK’s data centres were already consuming nearly 10 billion litres of drinking water per year – and likely much, much more.
As The Times reported: “The tally is almost certainly a large underestimate. It covers only about half of the data centres [in the UK] and the figures for Thames Water [by far the largest water supplier to data centres] are three years old.”
Aside from the massive water consumption we were able to reveal, the truly shocking thing we learned was that around half of the water companies in Britain were unable to say how much water they supply to data centres – because they didn’t know themselves.
That means it may be impossible, at least as things stand, to get an accurate picture of the current water consumption of data centres – let alone the likely effect of adding the many more hyperscale data centres being enthusiastically championed by the government, via AI Growth Zones.
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: we are all now in a battle of water – and we’re losing. Until we’re able to get an accurate picture of how much of our drinking water is going to be guzzled down by data centres, we can’t know that we will have enough for everyone to drink in future. Two parts of Britain are already in drought this year.
The Government’s own figures show that by 2050, we are looking at a shortfall of 5 billion litres per day from what we’ll have in our taps vs what we need. And as any expert will tell you, 2050 is tomorrow in water supply terms. That’s what’s at stake.
We’re going to keep pushing to get answers on this, as well as new hyperscale data centres’ huge power demands – and vast carbon emissions.
For all the updates as they come in, hit the button below: