Water Use Evaluated as Giant Data Center Projects in Pennsylvania Emerge

If you’ve followed some of the debates around the giant data center developments planned for Pennsylvania you know that many residents have concerns about data center construction and the impact on their communities.   

Water use is one area of concern, and not just in Pennsylvania.   Folks in Colorado, Utah, Wisconsin, Florida, Texas, Alabama, Michigan, and many other places are just as interested in the issue. 

Penn State Extension published an interesting, data-driven study that talks about the issue here in our commonwealth.   It reviews water usage by some major data centers that gets into hundreds of millions of gallons per year.  One interesting takeaway from the study is the large volume of water used by existing power and manufacturing activities in Pennsylvania. The Thermoelectric Power Generation sector withdraws over 3 billion gallons per DAY here in Pennsylvania alone.  Manufacturing pulls over half a billion gallons per day. 

So, water is a resource that has been responsibly managed in our communities by large users for generations.  At Direct LTx, we respect the concerns of neighbors regarding the mega data center projects, but believe water use will be utilized responsibly by the industry. 

If you’re in the Reading area, you may not be aware that you already have a major data center as a neighbor.   Direct LTx has been in business here in Reading for 20 years, and our data center was a power utility’s data center facility for more than a quarter of a century before that.  

We’ve implemented highly efficient cooling systems that use as little water and power as feasible. We communicate regularly with our local water district, and when a water main break or other emergency affects the water supply, we switch to our backup onsite groundwater well to reduce strain on the system.

While the large developments you’ve read about are nearly all built for a single hyperscale technology company (think Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc.), numerous local organizations, from startups to major enterprises and government agencies, operate their critical IT infrastructure systems securely from our high-availability data center.  

We’re happy to have been good neighbors, to the extent that many people whose daily commute brings them by the Direct LTx data center daily haven’t even noticed us.  Meanwhile many educational entities and economic development projects have benefited from our community involvement.  

If your technology goals require robust, highly connected data center space, or you’ve got a business or educational group that would like to see how a top-class data center operates, we’d love to host you.  Contact us for a tour at strategy@DirectLTx.com or simply schedule a conversation to discuss your IT infrastructure needs. And be sure to ask us about our uptime record.