‘Data Centres Will Add To Summer Heat, Public Hearing Must’
Hyderabad: The rush to encourage the construction of data centers will lead to the creation of ‘heat generating hubs’ that will worsen high summer temperatures. When the demand for large amounts of water is added, the problems will become even bigger. Environmentalists said public hearings should be held before data centers are built.
Environment and public policy expert Donthi Narasimha Reddy said the Union ministry of environment, forests and climate change should make environmental impact assessments mandatory for data centres. However, this cannot happen as data centers are currently screened for environmental cleanliness under a category for townships and area development projects, he said.
“Data centers are not much like townships. They are single-purpose, continuously operating industrial facilities characterized by extremely high electricity demand, significant water consumption for cooling and, critically, continuous, large-scale heat rejection to the environment,” said Narasimha Reddy.
He said the Ministry of Environment should notify a separate category of projects, broadly defined as ‘heat generating centres’, under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986 and the Environment (Protection) Rules, 1986. Narasimha Reddy added that there is no provision in the current classification regarding the thermal load of a data centre, its cumulative impact when co-located with other similar facilities, or water withdrawal based on regional climate and agricultural context. He said a letter had been sent to the ministry requesting a separate environmental classification for data centres.
Citing the example of hyperscale data center complex proposed at Chandanvelly and Manchanpally in Shabad mandal of Rangareddy district, Narasimha Reddy said the projected power demand is 645.07 MW with water requirement of 200 kilo liters per day. He said that according to the company’s own environmental impact assessment report, this center will be located in a region where the ambient temperature during the summer months varies between 40 and 44°C, reaching 45°C in May.
“The electrical power of a data center is, for all practical purposes, constantly discarded as heat into the environment. A single 645 MW facility is thermally equivalent to several hundred thousand household air conditioners operating continuously in one location,” he added.
Scientific studies have shown that the air temperature up to 500 meters downwind from facilities operating in the range of 36-169 MW increases by an average of 0.7-0.9°C and the highest temperature is 2.2°C. He said the Shabad facility is just one of several such facilities proposed within a roughly 15-20 km radius in the same area, creating a reasonable expectation of overlapping thermal plumes rather than isolated, independent effects.
Narasimha Reddy said that if the public tally of around 11 GW of MoU-backed data center capacity coming up in Telangana is anything to go by, “the scale of continuous heat rejection is at a completely different level. This will be equivalent to uninterrupted operation of around 8 million home air conditioners. This entire cluster is expected to come up in Chandanvelly, Bharat Future City, Fab City and the proposed Chevella data center city.”
He added that the areas around some of the proposed and existing data centers have around 60 percent of the land used for agriculture and this will be affected.
