Data centers impact on North Texas | Dallas News Live

There's been a lot of information being put out about the impact to your community on data centers, but what is real and what is not? To help us understand, joining me live is SMU Associate Professor of Computer Science, Klein Smith. Klein, data centers have become very political, but let's talk about the facts. What do people need to know about their potential impacts on their communities? So the four questions, the first thing is residents don't need to be engineers, right? Let's not make them engineers. simple questions to ask is how much power, who pays for the lines, how is it cooled, and how loud is it at the fence? And so that's very crucial, right? We need to really understand how much power is it going to use, who's paying for it, how is it cooled, and how loud is it? So once they ask those questions, the data center's responsibility, any builder, any construction company, any power, they're going to have to answer those questions. And based on those answers we can then start moving forward to what do we do how do we build it what do we need it sounds like data centers come in different shapes and sizes and so is it more of a case by case situation when these companies are approaching counties and cities that is crucial it is case by case and that's how we have to approach it i mean there are some overarching concepts as far as water as far as cooling you know are you going to cool it in-house or are you going to use a cooling outhouse? And I'm using nomenclature that aligns to the everyday conversation versus the deep terminology. But yes, the case-by-case basis, because there's a difference between a data center that is 200 megawatts versus a data center that is 10 megawatts. So we do have to look at this on a case-by-case basis. We have to look at where your power is, what part of the land is it going to be located on, where's your fiber, where's your cooling. So we do have to look at it on a case-by-case basis, and we can't group it all together. Citing critics of some data centers always talk about water and power. What does water have to do with a data center? Okay, so let's think about before, and I'll use the word before AI. I mean, most of us do know there was a time before AI. And if we think about where water is needed, water has to cool the data center. So let's talk about water first, right? Right now, the study from the Houston Advanced Research Center, it pretty much estimates data centers use about 25 billion gallons of water in 2025. That's roughly 4% of the state use. Now, the TWB estimated manufacturing at 7%, power generation at 4%. So you can see that the data center's use of water is lower than most other manufacturing and power generation concepts. Now, you've got to understand that there is manufacturing and there's power in creating a data center. But still, at that 0.4%, let's say if we push it up to one or two based on each year growing, we're still not utilizing the water and destroying the water like it's sometimes reported, right? Now, the power is rich, which is really interesting. One thing about being in Texas is ERCOT has its own Texas power grid. Now, what does that mean? It's regulated by the state rather than federal process that governs most other countries when they're trying to do power. Most other counties are cities. And so what that helps Texas do is truly identify and analyze and audit the data center that's coming on and what it's going to do to our power grid and how much impact. And oh, by the way, we have the connectivity. We have the ability to continue adding. And ERCOT has done a fantastic job maintaining and growing its power grid. But it's smart. It's intelligent. And it's saying, hey, you know what? This is going to put too much on our grid. Let's slow it down a little bit. So from a water perspective, there is using water. It's not as significant as some other industries, but it's still significant. We can't overlook it because we talked about it before. Depending on where you are and where you're building a data center, that water impact and that power impact could be significant. In other places, it could be insignificant. And Colin, you're talking about power. And I think I moved here in 2019. And then, of course, everyone knows about that winter storm that paralyzed the state. And ever since then, I've been hearing people talk about the grid over and over again. Luckily, it has not had any major issues since then. But is it somewhat people having PTSD about the grid itself now that they're more knowledgeable about it? And then hearing politicians on both sides talking about, oh, this is zapping your power. Is that part of where this concern when it comes to energy comes from? I think the answer is yes to that. The ERCOT, they did a root cause analysis and they went through and figured out why they had these challenges back in 2019. They addressed these challenges. They modified, they fixed, they enhanced, they improved. But they also put a lot of safeguards around. They increased their capacity. They keep modifying, amplifying the grid and aligning it with other sources of power. So that is a concern. But if you look at the last couple of storms, you'll notice that the grid, it did not reach its peak. And if it did, it barely reached it. But we were not in a concern. Now, we didn't have a 2019 storm, let's be honest. But something in comparison, if you do an analysis, a ratio, ERCOT's, that power grid is solid. And ERCOT is also, once again, because they control it, if a data center wants to come on, ERCOT is doing an audit and saying, hey, you know what, that's a little too big right now. You're going to have to pull that down until we make our modifications to accept that. So with that kind of control, we will be in great shape to modify and to keep bringing data centers on. The other thing that's important is that most of the contracts and most of the, I can't say that, the counties and places where we're building these data centers, they need to have that relationship with the data center that says, hey, if we need power, We need to pull it from you if we start to get into grid problems. And most of the data center companies that I've spoken to and I've dealt with, they are really open to that. And, Clive, before I let you go, should people be afraid of data centers or should they just be more knowledgeable of what questions to ask of their elected officials? So let me answer that in two ways. One, if the Internet is the road system, data centers are the warehouses. Nothing you do online happens in the air. It happens in a building, on a machine, on a server. that someone has to power and cool. So what we're asking ourselves is, do we want to continue advancing from a technology perspective? Do we want to still continue using applications on our iPhone? Do we still want to utilize the Internet? Do we still want to use this information that we need to get from place to place? The answer is yes, which means we must have data centers. And now the question becomes, going back to our communities, asking your politicians, asking your council, asking the data centers. Once again, I'll go to the questions. real simple how much power who pays for the line how is it cooled and how loud is it at the fence and and and once we start answering those questions we can really start to remove the we can we can provide clarity on what it's gonna mean when this data center comes in your community Collin Smith associate professor at SMU thank you for your time you're so welcome have a good one you too