Reducing data centers' water consumption around the Great Salt Lake
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Mary-Clare Bosco, Jonathan Gilmour and Rebecca Kilberg, 2024 Aspen Policy Academy fellows, wrote a policy plan for Utah. They recommend that the Office of the Great Salt Lake Commissioner set water-efficiency targets for the tech sector and work with local partners to collect new data on how much water data centers use.
Why it mattersData centers use water to cool their servers. The Great Salt Lake hit a record low in 2022 while the region was adding data centers, and no one had good numbers on how much water they draw.
What they learned
No learnings shared yet. The most useful thing on any entry is what the team tried and what happened, including what didn't work.
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The problem
Data centers in the Great Salt Lake region use water for cooling at a time when the lake is shrinking, and public data on their water use is thin.
Papers, data and other outputs
Sources
- Project page, Aspen Policy Academy (2024)
- Policy brief (PDF, 2024)
- Executive summary (PDF, 2024)
- Fact sheet (PDF, 2024)
- Op-ed, Salt Lake Tribune (31 Dec 2024)