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Water groups warn H.727 must address large withdrawals and thermal discharge from data centers
Summary
The Lake Champlain Committee and the Vermont Natural Resources Council told the committee that data centers cooling can require hundreds of thousands of gallons per day, create thermal discharges regulated under the Clean Water Act, and trigger gaps in state permitting that the bill should close. They offered precedents and asked to submit draft language.
Jared Carpenter (Lake Champlain Committee) and John Grumman (policy and water program director, Vermont Natural Resources Council) told the House Energy and Digital Infrastructure Committee on Feb. 26 that H.727 must address water withdrawals, thermal discharge and permitting gaps before Vermont approves large data-center projects.
Carpenter and Grumman said even relatively small commercial data centers can require on the order of 300,000 gallons per day for cooling; they said roughly 80% of that intake may be lost to evaporation in an open-loop cooling system with the balance discharged as heated wastewater. "You would need a fairly decent sized water source," Carpenter said, and witnesses warned many Vermont rivers and lakes could not sustain…
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