The new hydrological planning 2028-2033 that the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge has put out for public consultation barely mentions the water consumption of data centers. In the midst of a boom in announcements to install them in Spain, only one hydrographic confederation, that of the Ebro, mentions them, which does not expect a relevant impact.
This confederation points out in the memory of the initial documents of the fourth cycle of hydrological planning that in that period “the demand for industrial water is very low for the entire basin and its slight increase, even due to the cooling needs of the centers of data, will have effects that are close to imperceptible, except in very local cases.”
The Ebro Hydrographic Confederation (CHE), one of the most important in Spain, indicates in that document that the factors that influence water consumption for industrial use “are so complex and the environments so changing that it is difficult to present credible projections.” . He points out that after the large industrial investments in recent years in that demarcation of the agri-food sector (mainly meat), “at the present time they seem to focus on data centers and changes in mobility, such as the manufacture of batteries.”
The confederation explains, when asked about this matter, that “in the case of the Ebro basin, the existing data centers take water from the supply networks of the towns in which they are located, in the case of Villanueva de Gállego or Huesca”. “They are part of the supply consumption,” an aspect “controlled” by the corresponding municipalities “and not by the CHE.”
“In any case, today”, the water consumption associated with the data centers in the Ebro area “does not represent a significant amount in terms of use of the resource, also taking into account that only a percentage of the water is consumed. water used by evaporation,” says the CHE.
In recent months there have been announcements of multimillion-dollar investments in data centers in Aragon. In October there were 7.5 billion from the venture capital giant Blackstone in Calatorao (Zaragoza) for the largest of those announced so far in Spain, with 300 megawatts (MW) of power. In Aragon, Microsoft plans to invest more than 6.6 billion in three data centers and Amazon announced in May that it will invest more than 15.7 billion until 2033 to build four additional centers to the three it already planned there.
Its subsidiary Amazon Web Services will begin to build them in the second half of this year and, when they are at full capacity, in the next decade, they will have an estimated electrical consumption of 10,800 gigawatt hours (GWh) per year, more than the entire current consumption of Aragon. This region expects that by 2030 data centers will account for half of its total energy demand. The consumption of water to cool Amazon’s equipment will be about 755,000 cubic meters, although the company has committed to returning more than it uses, according to the General Interest Plan on this multimillion-dollar project that has just been put on public display.
The absence of allusions to data centers in hydrological planning is surprising in the case of the Tajo Hydrographic Confederation (CHT), competent in regions such as Madrid, where Microsoft has also announced important investments in data centers, or Castilla-La Mancha, where Meta, owner of Facebook, WhatsApp or Instagram, has already achieved a favorable Environmental Impact Declaration (DIA) to begin building a data center in Talavera de la Reina (Toledo) this year.
Declared by the Government of Castilla-La Mancha as of Singular Interest, a category reserved for strategic developments and that allows the acceleration of bureaucratic procedures and the dedication of public land to private activities, the public company SEPES completed the sale of industrial land for infrastructure a few days ago. , which will be built on a 190-hectare plot in an industrial estate on the outskirts of that town on the banks of the Tagus. Meta cut the center’s water consumption forecast by 24% at the end of 2023, at the request of the CHT, which warned of the limited availability of resources in the region. The center is expected to absorb 8% of the water resources assigned to Talavera.
Sources from the CHT recall that, once the project is approved by the Board, the promoter must submit authorization requests if they affect the Public Hydraulic Domain, as stated in the reports it issued at the time, in which it established a series of conditions on aspects such as the existence of water resources. Once the requests are received, they will be studied, based on the documentation presented, “whether it complies with the water regulations to proceed to authorize the action,” indicates the CHT.
The new planning tiptoes around the issue of data centers after a 2024 full of announcements, with the Artificial Intelligence revolution in the making. The employer’s association that brings together the sector, Spain DC, assures on its website that “if the appropriate conditions were given to the sector in terms of taxation, availability of energy and space, direct investment could reach 14.4 billion euros between 2026 and 2030” .
DC Spain, formed by the large technological giants and to which large construction, real estate, brick and energy consulting companies are also linked, assures that “Spain has positioned itself as the ideal place to host the new wave of Data Centers due to its geographical location and for its logistical capacity to receive and maintain infrastructure”, for its availability of land, solar and wind resources and good fiber optic and submarine cable infrastructure.
The Norwegian consulting firm DNV estimates that these centers represented a consumption of 6TWh of electricity in 2024 in Spain, around 2.4% of demand. DNV believes that in 2030 they will consume twice as much energy and in 2050 they could reach 26 TWh. “It represents a considerable challenge for the Spanish electricity grid, which will have to guarantee a constant and sustainable supply.”
Data centers can be a vector to reactivate electricity demand, a key issue to make the deployment of renewables viable. This rebound is beginning to be noticed in the United States, where this sector is much more developed. There, the consulting firm ICF expects electricity consumption to skyrocket by 20% until 2033 in the heat of this new industry.
In Spain, the latest review of the National Integrated Energy and Climate Plan (PNIEC) sent by the Ecological Transition to Brussels in September predicts that electricity demand will grow by 34% in 2030 compared to 2019. But in its more than 700 pages the document only dedicates a line to data centers. It states that “a regulatory framework will be promoted that promotes and orders the sustainable installation” of data centerswhile requests to join the network of projects with nothing behind them begin to accumulate, as happened with the bubble of resale of renewable permits years ago.
If the enormous energy needs of these centers are clear, the same is not true in the case of water. A report published last July by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development summarizes it as follows: “The lack of transparency of data operators makes it difficult to access updated information and evaluate the sector’s water consumption at a national or regional scale.” ”.
Effect of green hydrogen
The drafts of the new hydrological planning do believe that more demand for water to produce green hydrogen is “expected”, a great commitment by the Government for the coming years. This is stated in the drafts drawn up by two of the main hydrographic confederations, those of the Duero and the Ebro, which recall that “the increase in renewable energy production in recent years, which causes situations of zero or almost zero cost in the wholesale market of energy on sunny days at the central hours of the day, has the secondary effect that energy companies consider energy storage projects in the form of hydrogen gas or even ammonia, using renewable energy from nearby plants.
The PNIEC contemplates new green hydrogen production plants with 11 GW of capacity by 2030. Plants that “need water as a raw material for the production of hydrogen or ammonia, which is the means of storing energy for subsequent combustion,” both recall. confederations.
“Currently, three concessions are being processed in the Duero demarcation for the use of water for the production of green hydrogen of about 4 hm3/year, but it is expected that more will be presented in the future,” says the document prepared by the Hydrographic Confederation of the Douro (CHT). The Ebro indicates that “there are several projects still in initial stages” in the demarcation. “The one with the most advanced processing is Hysencia”, promoted by DH2 Energy, “with 35 MW of electrolysis capacity in La Sotonera (Huesca). It should be taken into account that to produce 1 kg of hydrogen through electrolysis, around 50 kWh and 35 kg of water are needed,” notes the CHE.
Ecological Transition began on December 21 the public consultation for this planning with the initial documents of the state-level demarcations. The next key stages will be the so-called Important Issue Outlines, which will be publicly available before the end of the year. The draft hydrological plan for the period 2028-2033 will be put out for public consultation before the end of 2026. The process must be completed before December 31, 2027.
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