Can We Design Big Better?

In a December 2025 story, an environmental reporter for The Guardian indicated that 230 environmental groups have asked for a moratorium on building new data centers in the U.S. This is generally related to opposition to rising electricity costs and the need for large amounts of water to cool equipment. In 2025 alone, the story says, household electricity prices increased by 13 percent.

Charles Hua, executive director of PowerLines, which aims to reduce power costs, told the reporter that recent elections in New Jersey, Georgia, and Virginia indicate that rising utility bills have become a core concern of voters. Aging transmission lines, extreme weather damage, and data centers are listed as causes of rising electricity costs. The current administration’s cuts to renewable energy options will also have a negative impact on costs, Hua says.

At the November water forum moderated by Minnesota Women’s Press, EOR’s Anabel Sanford noted that there are innovative designers in Minnesota who can become part of building a better system. “When any [energy] load is added to the grid, we can do something that is far more sophisticated than what we’re doing now, while also being very aware of the water demand on our system,” she said. “The way to get there is communicating with each other and with industry” about what our values and priorities are.

What International Communities Are Doing

A May 2025 story by Bloomberg described the work people are doing in Scandinavia to minimize the energy consumption of hyperscale data centers. Given people’s growing expectancy to access directions, online information, and communications by digital means, engineers and designers are trying to figure out how to minimize the environmental and consumer cost issues of massive buildings.

In southern Finland, one solution is to use pipes and pumps to harvest the heat of data centers to warm about 2,500 homes, which cuts energy costs for residents. The biggest heat recovery project is being built by Microsoft near Helsinki, which aims to provide heating to about 100,000 homes; this project enabled the closing of a coal-fired heating plant.

As the Bloomberg reporters put it: “No data center is good for the environment, but projects like this can help alleviate their negative effects as the demand for computing power surges globally.”

The largest data centers can consume a city’s worth of electricity, often produced from polluting fossil fuels, they wrote. A Goldman Sachs Group report indicates data center energy consumption is expected to increase by 50 percent between 2023 and 2027; a report by the International Energy Agency projects data center power demand to double by 2030.

Bloomberg reports on the tensions and solutions in other countries about data center growth.

U.S.-owned centers in Ireland use 20 percent of the country’s electricity, and some advocates are pointing out that all this energy is being used for places that don’t employ many people — the energy could fuel spaces that serve employees.

Many European cities have thousands of miles of underground district heating pipes providing thermal energy from a central plant — a concept that started in ancient Rome. In Minnesota, 100 downtown Minneapolis buildings, 160 buildings in Duluth, and more than 200 locations in Saint Paul are heated in this way.

Germany is requiring large data centers opening in 2028 to use 20 percent of their waste heat. With a country-wide target, no one location can negotiate lower standards. The European Union overall requires data centers of at least 500 kilowatts to publicly share key information about energy consumption and water us­e.

A region in China is using cold lake water in a closed-loop system for cooling, also used by Google in Finland and Microsoft in Denmark. South Korea is using cold air in mountainous regions to cool servers.

Perspectives From Two Minnesota Design Engineers

We talked to two Minnesotans engaged in data center design to find out what options developers might have for building sustainability into data centers. Thom Jackson is a mechanical engineer at Dunham Associates in Minneapolis and has designed data centers for 23 years. He is exploring the potential for aquifer geothermal systems, which utilize a flowing aquifer to enhance heat transfer for a cooling-only system. Trisha Sieh of Kimley-Horn, an engineering and design firm, has been a civil engineer for 20 years — 13 years in the data center industry — and often works on the external design of optimizing water sources.

Sieh says, “The balance that Thom and I are trying to work on for every site, depending on the specific conditions: what’s available, what’s not, what is the best solution for that particular data center? We’re able to look at vast sources: wastewater treatment plants, groundwater sources, surface water sources, rainwater harvesting, drain tile collection.”

Her job, Sieh says, is to figure out how to source water more responsibly. She notes that one reason Minnesota is considered a good spot for data centers is the winter offers a kind of “free cooling” option.

Jackson indicates that heat reuse data centers can be designed without having citywide district heating loops. “If the data center is near adjacent buildings, the heat can be rejected for heating water, domestic hot water, or in some cases a combined heat and power microgrid.”

We briefly discussed complaints about energy costs and water impact in other states with hyperscale data centers. Jackson indicates that when the big boom of U.S. data centers started a decade ago in Northern Virginia, “they oversubscribed for power, because everybody kept coming in.”

Regarding the timeline, the two say that there is usually a year of (often private) due diligence to study the site for environmental and engineering feasibility. There is maybe another year of working through public processes. Another year for permitting. Then years of construction for hyperscale centers.

Sieh, who has been involved in data center projects before they became public, says, “There are checks and balances; we’re not just doing things in a bubble. There are a multitude of regulations, getting this permit, getting that permit, which are usually public processes. It’s a collaborative effort.”

Jackson says some city leaders have been concerned about what happens when over-saturation in the industry leaves hyperscale facilities sitting empty. Since these facilities are big warehouses, he says, they could be used for office spaces, indoor roller rinks, and other creative options. “Usually, what happens is these companies get bought by each other,” he says. “Or we’re refreshing IT equipment every couple of years. But the data center itself, that’s going to stick around for a long time.”