Slonme – stock. adobe. com
Microsoft’s knowledge centers drank no more water than the same summer heat wave, the software giant claimed, contrary to news reports describing one of its massive European campuses consuming surprisingly high volumes of drinking water as temperatures across the continent reached record levels.
In July, Microsoft President Brad Smith said corporations will need to be transparent and accountable about their environmental footprint to end the man-made climate crisis that was “ending the human habitability of the planet. “
At the same time, the software giant released a series of confusing statements about water use through a massive knowledge medium campus it had been building for the past 8 years in the Netherlands, where vehement green distrust of commercial computing and a drought so severe that it has made a country with abundant water resources prepare for an era of scarcity. generated newspaper articles accusing Microsoft of hiding inconvenient truths.
Dutch newspapers accused the software company of using 4 times more water last year than it told lawmakers when it requested permission to continue expanding the site.
Resonating across the internet at the height of the heat wave, this became a terrible equation: A fourfold increase in Microsoft’s water intake means data centers plus weather replacement amount to disaster.
But not only do Microsoft’s knowledge centers at the Agriport business park in Hollands Kroon not consume more water than the same in this hot year, but maximum temperatures in Europe will not translate into higher water intake in the future, the company said in a written statement.
As a booming knowledge intermediary industry uses ever-increasing amounts of water to run cooling systems that prevent its IT component aisles from overheating on a commercial scale, alarm has spread around the world to spaces where homes, farms and factories have depleted grass-based water resources. at dangerously low levels. Levels.
The additional water Microsoft used last year was not used to operate data centers, but to build more, the company said. Local and app companies have insisted that the water used in their Agriport data centers is minimal.
Data center air cooling systems, such as Microsoft’s, only use water when outside temperatures are so high that the air is rarely cold enough to do the task on its own, the company said. In bloodless northern countries like the Netherlands, temperatures are also high during some hot hours in midsummer.
However, Microsoft reported such variable figures for its water consumption at Agriport that it fueled a political scandal that prevented at least 3 rival corporations from building there and also in the Netherlands.
Now, ongoing works and existing structure plans from Microsoft and Google, the intermediate data operators at Agriport, are the structures allowed there.
“It will be much more complicated to get permission now than it was two or three years ago,” said Matthijs Beute, intermediate knowledge manager at Hollands Kroon Local Council, who championed Agriport’s progression to a large-scale knowledge park.
“Council members are more critical of this. Ten years ago, all plans were agreed unanimously. Now it’s more like 50-50. There are more opponents. “
Amid the scandal, Microsoft reportedly told Hollands Kroon officials last year, on the eve of a Democratic vote on its expansion plans, that it was using what amounted to 10 times less water than it had claimed. He would, and 4 times less than he actually did.
Microsoft’s claims estimate its water consumption in incredibly varying amounts between 10,000 m³ and 100,000 m³ last year. But this was equivalent to the equivalent water consumption of about 100, 700 or 1000 households, for a commercial site offering cloud computing on more than two continents: and one of 35 sites operating a nearly one hundred billion dollar global cloud. IT company.
“It’s not a general problem,” said Robert Kielstra, director of ECW Energy, which operates water and electric power infrastructure in Agriport.
“What are 700 families if you supply Microsoft Teams or Bing or Exchange to a part of Europe?” he added, referring to the cloud Microsoft runs from its server farms.
Data intermediate water intake is even decreasing, said Anneke de Groot, director of regional water provider PWN. North Holland, a province of just about 3 million inhabitants.
“That’s a ridiculously low amount of water,” said Jack Kranenburg, manager of Agriport Business Park, referring to higher estimates attributed to Microsoft’s water use.
“They don’t use a lot of water,” said Jan Willem Huizinga of HHNK’s water board. “The quantities are small.
Microsoft’s water intake in North Holland accounts for between 0. 009% and 0. 09% of the province’s municipal supply. The consultation of its quadrupling on a hole of 0. 08%.
The political climate in the Netherlands, driven by alarm over climate change, but so hostile to knowledge hubs in 2021 that it disappointed the political balance within local government where knowledge parks were intended for development, and forcibly led to opposing political parties to more knowledge hubs built in a country that, as the main crossroads of the global Internet, it is home to one of the most successful intermediate knowledge industries in the world.
Grossly erroneous estimates of average knowledge water consumption, leaked to the national newspaper De Telegraaf and its subsidiary, Noord Hollands Dagblad, in the spring of 2021, fueled opposition led by green and left-wing activists and political parties vying for strength as a weakened and favorable party. The centre-right government has sought to close the longest coalition talks in Dutch history.
He said two Hollands Kroon data centers consume 525 m³ of water per hour. This was almost nine times the municipal water fed through the entire industry in the North Netherlands, comprising 52 data centers, adding 28 in Hollands Kroon, and the total of Amsterdam, one of Europe’s largest intermediate knowledge markets. This was even equivalent to watering Microsoft’s entire cloud business in 2021, which then included 35 intermediate knowledge campuses in 19 countries.
PWN has debunked the estimate. But Noord Hollands Dagblad accused Microsoft of misleading Hollands Kroon’s advisers with a falsehood about their water use, as they prepared to vote on their plan to double the length of their campus and opposition to the data center set in the press and parliament.
Microsoft told the board that its Agriport data centers use 12,000 to 20,000 square meters of water per year, a board spokesman said, he said.
That equated to just a hundred to two hundred households, Rob Elsinga, Microsoft’s national leaders generation officer, told an industry magazine.
The board executive wrote Microsoft’s in a memo to councilors, and the chamber approved his leave until 18-10.
However, an app Microsoft created in 2018 when it made plans for its expansion plans showed it used 86,000 square meters for cooling, Noord Hollands Dagblad said. When fully built and operating at full capacity, a procedure that can take a decade.
Then, in April 2022, a year after the vote, Microsoft told Hollands Kroon that, after all, it had powered 84,000 m³ in 2021. It used 75,000 m³ for “operations” and 9,000 m³ for “facilities,” according to a notified email extract. Another email he wrote to Noord Hollands Dagblad said he had 75,000 m³ for refrigeration. The 12,000 to 20,000 m³ he reported to the public government was not a forecast, but only what it was “at the time. “
Three weeks later, Microsoft contradicted itself again. It used 75,000 square meters in 2021 for cooling but for “operation and construction,” he told Computer Weekly. He used another 9,000 m³ for toilets (“toilets, etc. “), or 84,000 m³.
He then said that 12,000 to 20,000 m³ had been a forecast after all. The “mature data center” would consume only 10,000 m³. Contrary to reports that their water consumption had increased almost tenfold, it appeared to drop to ten.
Microsoft declined to say what explained the differences. It also left officials in doubt. Hollands Kroon still believes Microsoft powered 75,000 square feet of cooling last year, though he can’t be sure.
Beute said councillors had asked for information about the cooling, but the council had not responded because intermediate information operators had only provided interchangeable information.
“It’s that nothing,” he said. But we inspire them to be more transparent. “
Although local councils have no jurisdiction over water in the Netherlands, where a complicated water formula is governed by regional councils and run through personal public services, this has prevented climate activists from impeding the structure of knowledge hubs.
“I can see why they don’t need to release all the information,” Beete said. “If you give a number and next week you have another, you’re anchored in it and they’re like, ‘You. ‘re mendacity or cheat. ‘”
But last year, Microsoft raised the operating temperature of its knowledge centers, pushing them above popular limits that set the maximum safe temperature for computers. eat water from 27°C to 29. 4°C.
Data center representative Peter Jeffs said his own models expect such a difference to reduce the time in a year that an air-cooled data center in northern Europe would need water by 60 percent. Then, when outside temperatures crossed the threshold, you’d want less cooling.
“Cooling from 35°C to 27°C will require a lot of water than cooling from 35°C to 29°C,” he said.
Microsoft said this was one reason global warming wouldn’t increase its projected water consumption. The highest operating temperature alone could just be the drastic reduction of Microsoft’s forecasts, said Mark Acton, an expert who helped draft the EU’s central data regulation.
Meanwhile, Microsoft joined an ECW Energy program to collect rainwater from the roofs of its Agriport buildings in an underground store and use it when it needs water in the summer. More rainwater comes out of the roof of an air-cooled data center than it can use on its own, ECW’s Kielstra said.
ECW already operates the same formula with the massive greenhouse industry for which the business park was originally created, and is looking to adapt it to existing knowledge hubs.
Microsoft also plans to launch a large-scale waterless liquid cooling formula within two years, it told Dutch water industry newspaper Waterforum last year. More effective because they allow PC chips to operate safely at about twice the existing temperatures, said Gemma Reeves, advertising director at refrigeration company Alfa Laval.
Today’s air cooling systems have become imaginable because the IT industry has spent the last 25 years raising computer safety temperature thresholds for energy efficiency, driven through festivals to reduce costs and through green projects that precede the knowledge intermediary industry. Over the past decade, Greenpeace has also called on the industry to reduce its electricity consumption and, consequently, its carbon emissions that contribute to global warming.
They raised the protective temperature threshold from 18 °C to 27 °C, said Steve Wright, director of operations for 4D Data Centers. The force operated chillers to cool hot computers. Cutting the force meant a compromise, Acton said: water in place.
Johan Blom, the refrigeration engineer who drafted Microsoft’s permit application, said it made knowledge centers 80 to 90 percent more energy efficient, while “much less water. “
Now, the 10-year forecast of emerging average temperatures, unlike what media designers make cooling estimates, has already been surpassed by the actual heat wave, Jeffs said.
However, Microsoft promised last year that by 2030 it would fill more freshwater resources than it has used, starting from a broader conservation program.
“Humanity depletes the new water source to 4. 3 trillion cubic meters each year, mostly for agricultural and commercial purposes. In April, Microsoft released environmental data that revealed the scale of the challenge, making it one of four global knowledge hubs. operators need to be transparent about sustainability, but still not enough to answer the questions raised about Agriport.
In the Netherlands, however, as the world has moved away from the coronavirus-induced economic and social downturn thanks to services like Meta’s WhatsApp and Microsoft Teams, and data centers have grown to adapt to the momentous movement of information. Individual companies with major online broadcasts, Microsoft’s transparency has helped reshape the question of whether a data mall consumes as much water as 100 or 1,000 homes in a national political scandal.
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