Courtesy QTS Data Centers
One of QTS' data centers in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
QTS Data Centers has 75 data centers globally, including this one in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
How much energy would it take to operate a 600-acre data center proposed for the town of Vienna? A lot, says Kathy Kuntz, director of Dane County’s Office of Energy and Climate Change.
If the data center were operating cloud computing 24/7, it “would use about two-and-a-half times the electricity that all of Dane County uses currently,” Kuntz told members of Madison’s sustainability committee, which convened a meeting on Oct. 20 so that members could ask questions about the project. These large data centers, popping up around the country in response to growing use of AI and cloud computing, house IT infrastructure used for data storage and processing.
Consulting firm McKinsey estimated in April that “global demand for data center capacity could almost triple by 2030, with about 70% of that demand coming from AI workloads.”
Proposed facilities have proven controversial due to their high electricity and water consumption; many centers use water evaporation to cool server rooms. Google’s “hyperscale” data centers use on average 550,000 gallons of water a day — the average American uses 132 gallons of water in a day. Bloomberg projected in April that data centers by 2035 would account for 8.6% of U.S. electricity demand, “more than double their 3.5% share today.”
QTS Data Centers’ proposal calls for 15 to 16 buildings, Kuntz said. The buildings would be leased to other tech companies, she added. Kathleen Clark, clerk of the town of Vienna, tells Isthmus that QTS has not yet submitted a formal proposal for the project to the town.
Kuntz said the data center would use a closed-loop glycol refrigeration system in which a solution composed of water and glycol, an organic compound which lowers the water’s freezing point, would absorb and dissipate heat, and then be reused. QTS website claims its cooling system “does not consume water for cooling, once operational.”
But glycol refrigeration uses more energy than evaporative cooling, which is more commonly utilized by data centers, Kuntz said. She added that the county has been in conversation with both QTS and Alliant Energy, which would be providing electricity for the project, about using renewable energy options and reducing the project’s total electricity use.
“We’ve been nudging QTS a little bit about what else could they do creatively” for sustainable energy, said Kuntz, though she noted that the state, not the county, sets energy codes. It is also possible that Alliant Energy would look at building more non-renewable energy capacity, like gas plants, to power the campus, Kuntz said.
“Everyone says they're interested in this topic,” Kuntz added. “We need to get to, ‘Yeah, we're committed to doing something together that's gonna demonstrably reduce the total build out [of energy] that's required here.’”
Senior representatives from QTS met with County Executive Melissa Agard on June 26 to discuss the project, according to records obtained by Isthmus.
Carrie Springer, Agard’s chief of staff, says in an interview that the meeting was exploratory and in part discussed the zoning process for the land; because Vienna is a town, rezoning for the proposal would fall to Dane County. Any rezoning proposal would use land use designations outlined in the town's comprehensive plan as criteria. The town board is discussing amendments to its comprehensive plan tonight, though Clark says that those amendments are unrelated QTS’ data center.
Springer adds that no economic incentives were discussed at the meeting with QTS.
“It was them basically walking through, like, ‘Here's where we've been in the past, here's our commitment to environmental stuff.’ Because they had heard people had concerns about that,” says Springer. “We didn't discuss anything in detail.”
A QTS spokesperson says in an email to Isthmus that the company is still “exploring the opportunity” to bring a data center to Dane County.
“We are committed to being a responsible and engaged neighbor, bringing economic growth, environmental stewardship and a focus on community prosperity to the region,” she said.
