The segment was reacting to a magazine piece about an 8,000-member group organized against a data center, and the rebuttal was that the group is worried about nothing.
'The idea that data centers use up water is just totally wrong,' the host said. 'Like it's a closed system usually. Um so there's no extra water.' Then the physics: 'when you heat up water, it just turns to steam and then... it evaporates,' and 'the water doesn't like disappear' [1].
The Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory publishes the federal accounting of this, and it addresses the objection in its definitions: 'Water consumption refers to the amount of withdrawn water that is permanently removed from the immediate water cycle due to evaporation or other irreversible processes' [2].
Evaporation is not the reason the water is fine. Evaporation is the mechanism by which it is counted as consumed - because it leaves the watershed the community draws from.
The quantities: 21.2 billion litres in 2014, 66 billion litres by 2023, of which hyperscale and colocation facilities account for 84 percent [2]. Hyperscale alone is projected at between 60 and 124 billion litres by 2028, with an indirect footprint from electricity generation of nearly 800 billion litres [2]. Sixty-six billion litres is about 17.4 billion gallons a year, and the report specifically names 'the water evaporation process in cooling towers' as the source of concern 'at the local level' [2].
Some facilities do run closed-loop systems. The claim was not that some do. The claim was that the concern is 'just totally wrong.'
The second claim was about bills: 'you don't see a massive increase in your municipal power cost or whatever... Yeah, and that doesn't happen, either. It just doesn't happen' [1].
PJM Interconnection, the grid operator for thirteen states and the District of Columbia, published its capacity auction results on July 14. Prices for 2028/2029 cleared at the FERC-approved cap of $325 per megawatt-day, after the previous year cleared at its own cap of $333.44 [3].
PJM's release explains why in its own words: the auction 'saw the continued trend of the addition of large data center loads to the load forecast that forms the basis of the reliability requirement.' Chief executive David Mills, in the same release: 'PJM recognizes how this supply-and-demand imbalance impacts the reliability of the system and costs for consumers' [3].
A capacity auction clearing at the regulatory ceiling in consecutive years is the opposite of nothing happening, and the grid operator is the one saying so.
