'Data Centres Will Add To Summer Heat, Public Hearing Must'

HYDERABAD: The rush to encourage setting up of data centres will lead to creation of ‘heat-generating centres’ which will worsen the high summer temperatures. Coupled with the demand for large volumes of water, the problems will only be compounded. There is a need to conduct public hearings before data centres can be set up, environmentalists have said.

The Union ministry of environment, forests and climate change must make environmental impact assessments for data centers mandatory, Donthi Narasimha Reddy, environment and public policy expert, said. But this cannot happen as at present, data centres are screened for environmental clearance under a category meant for townships and area development projects, he said.

“Data centres bear little resemblance to townships. They are single-purpose, continuously operating industrial facilities characterised by extremely high electricity demand, substantial water consumption for cooling, and, critically, continuous, large-scale heat rejection to the surrounding environment,” Narasimha Reddy said.

He said the environment ministry must notify a distinct project category, defined broadly as ‘heat-generating centres’, under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, and the Environment (Protection) Rules, 1986. There are no provisions in the current categorisation of a data centre’s thermal load, its cumulative effect when co-located with other similar facilities, or its water draw against regional climate and agricultural context, Narasimha Reddy added. He said a letter was sent to the ministry seeking a separate environmental classification for data centers.

Citing the example of a hyperscale data centre complex proposed at Chandanvelly and Manchanpally in Shabad mandal of Rangareddy district, Narasimha Reddy said the projected power demand was 645.07 MW with a water requirement 200 kilo litres per day. This centre is to come up, as per the company’s own environmental impact assessment report, in an area where the ambient summer temperatures of range between 40 and 44°C, reaching 45°C in May, he said.

“A data centre's electrical power draw is, for all practical purposes, continuously ejected to the environment as heat. A single 645 MW facility is thermally equivalent to several hundred thousand household air-conditioners operating without interruption at one location,” he added.

Scientific studies have shown that downwind air-temperature increase by an average of 0.7–0.9°C and peak at 2.2°C, up to 500 metres from operating facilities in the 36–169 MW range. The Shabad facility is just one of several such facilities proposed within a roughly 15–20 km radius in the same district, raising a reasonable expectation of overlapping thermal plumes rather than isolated, independent impacts, he said.

If the publicly available number of proposed approximately 11 GW of MoU-backed capacity of data centres coming up in Telangana is anything go by, “the scale of continuous heat rejection involved is of an entirely different order. This will be equal to around 8 million household air-conditioners running without interruption. This entire cluster is expected to come up in Chandanvelly, Bharat Future City, Fab City, and the proposed Chevella data centre city,” Narasimha Reddy said.

The areas around the proposed and some of the existing data centers, he said, have roughly 60 per cent of the land used for agriculture, which will be impacted, he added.