“They’re going to use all our water.” That claim shows up at nearly every data centre town hall in this province. It needs a number attached to it before anyone accepts or rejects it.
Not All Cooling Systems Are The Same System
Some data centres genuinely do consume substantial amounts of water. Others use cooling systems that barely touch it. The difference comes down to one design choice: how the facility actually removes heat.
Closed-loop liquid cooling works the way a vehicle’s cooling system does. Coolant circulates through the equipment, picks up heat, carries it through the system, releases that heat, and goes around again in a sealed loop. The important question is what happens next: how does the facility get rid of the heat the coolant just picked up? An evaporative cooling tower does it by evaporating water, which consumes real volume over time. Dry cooling does it with air instead, using fans and radiators rather than evaporation.
A 10,000 Times Difference Is Not A Rounding Error
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has found that water consumed per unit of computing workload can vary by more than 10,000 times, depending on the equipment, the cooling system design, the local climate, the electricity supply and several other factors. That range is the whole reason “data centres use a lot of water” is not actually a useful sentence on its own. Two facilities running the same workload can sit on opposite ends of a 10,000-times spread, purely based on engineering choices made at the design stage.
What Meta Is Actually Claiming In Sturgeon County
Meta says its planned Sturgeon County facility will combine closed-loop liquid cooling with dry cooling, and states there will be no operational water use in its cooling system specifically. That is a real, checkable engineering claim, not a vague promise. The site will still require water for ordinary building needs such as domestic use, fire protection and maintenance, which is normal for any large facility and is not the same thing as cooling-system consumption.
That distinction matters enormously in a room full of people worried about their water table. “Closed loop” by itself tells you almost nothing. The question that actually matters is what happens to the heat once it is in that loop, and whether the answer is evaporation or air.
The Question To Actually Bring To The Next Town Hall
Never accept “closed loop” as a complete answer on its own, from any developer, on any project. Ask for the litres. Ask whether the cooling design is evaporative or dry, and ask for the number attached to normal operations, not just a best-case engineering spec. Rural Alberta communities weighing these projects deserve a real figure to evaluate, not a phrase that sounds reassuring without actually answering the question.
Save this explanation and bring the real question to the next data centre open house: what is the litres-per-day number, and how was it measured?
