Great Lakes region faces rising, unprecedented demand for its water resources

Water shortages, groundwater conflicts and contaminated aquifers are some of the growing threats faced by Great Lakes States. That’s according to a new report out Wednesday from the Alliance for the Great Lakes, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization.

MPR News host Phil Picardi spoke with Helena Volzer, the report’s author. Volzer explained where the increasing and unprecedented demand for Great Lakes water is coming from — and how to address it. 

The following conversation has been edited for clarity. 

The Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River Basin hold the world’s largest supply of surface freshwater. How could there not be enough to go around?

Less than 1 percent of the Great Lakes are actually replenished each year through rainfall, snow melt, and groundwater inflows. Where the threat really exists at the current moment is between the connection between surface water and groundwater, which is not something that people tend to think about. The groundwater in this region is connected to the Great Lakes, and between 20-40 percent of water in the Great Lakes actually originates as groundwater. 

There is an increasing demand for Great Lakes water, and a particular concern when it comes to groundwater resources at this moment.

And what is the demand? What is the threat for the groundwater?

The three sectors that we looked at in the report are data centers, critical minerals, mining and agriculture. Data centers can use water for cooling the servers that are inside. They get very hot during processing. 

The primary method, or the most common method in the industry right now, is called evaporative cooling. And so water is pushed through a membrane by fans, which cools this entire server room, and then more than half of that water is evaporating off. Whatever is not evaporated is discharged. It’s wastewater, or it can be recirculated for use in the data center. 

It’s really that consumptive use portion that’s of concern, where it’s evaporating off and not returning to the watershed necessarily in a predictable and reliable way, especially in our hot and dry summers now, because of climate change. 

There’s a risk that without regional planning, and really understanding where water is available and where it’s not, that this could stress and strain groundwater aquifers, especially at the same time that you have irrigated agriculture really increasing in the region. 

The Great Lakes region is a heavily agricultural one, and places like Northwest Ohio and parts of Wisconsin now are increasingly turning to irrigation during those hot, dry summer spells. And so those two demands really are converging on groundwater resources at the same time.

There is a compact currently in place to protect Great Lakes states from outside entities dipping a straw into our water resources. Is that compelling businesses, data centers and the like, to say, ‘Let’s just set up shop in a Great Lakes state?’ 

That’s one of the things we touch on in the report as well. The Great Lakes Compact is something that was signed between the Great Lakes states and made applicable to the two Canadian provinces, around 2008.

And it’s really something that serves as the foundation for this region. It prohibits the diversion of water outside of the Great Lakes basin. So, you know, we’re not piping water out west. We’re not shipping it overseas. 

That compact requires states to have conservation and efficiency programs to manage their water use, and so that is one of the reasons our water resources really do make this region attractive to industries like data centers and semiconductor chip manufacturing and others. There was a lot of manufacturing steel in this region, historically. So it's just  a different sector at this particular moment in time.

Your report says without proper stewardship of the water resources here, the Great Lakes region faces potential threats to drinking water supplies, local businesses and food production. Is this something that’s what, 10 years down the line? Twenty years down the line? Is it happening now? 

I think that it’s starting to happen right now. The Great Lakes region already has existing conflicts over groundwater in particular regions. In southwest Michigan, there’s been a lot of home building, with homeowners and agriculture kind of coming into conflict over groundwater resources. 

In the central sands region in Wisconsin, and then just outside of South Bend, Indiana, there was a report a few months ago about a data center and EV battery plant suspected to have caused residents wells to run dry. I think we’re at a turning point, really, where we may start to see some more of these examples crop up.

There was an article in The New York Times about a data center in Georgia that had impacted residents’ wells, and we’re not seeing those direct examples right this moment yet, but I think that may be where we’re headed without the pro proper regional planning necessary to inform sustainable siting of data centers, semiconductor chip manufacturing and EV battery plants.  

So what can Great Lakes states do?

Regional planning studies to inform [water] demand predictions and help economic development courts in these states make development decisions that are informed as to where water resources are available, where they’re not, where it may strain groundwater resources. 

At the same time, there’s a bit of a quirk with the way that data centers and other large water using industries that are connected to municipal water aren’t required to report or track their water use.

That requirement falls to the public water system, and so creating more transparency around data centers water use, both at the siting stage, which is often protected by non-disclosure agreements, and then also at the back end, once the data center is built, making sure that there are water use reporting requirements in place. 

And then, in addition to that, the Great Lakes region’s groundwater management laws currently aren't very well equipped to allow states to curb or halt or limit groundwater use before there's been some kind of resource impact.

And so we make recommendations in the report regarding those state laws and things that we think that states can be taking a closer look at to be better prepared for when and where these groundwater types of conflicts might crop up. 

And then finally, exploring additional conservation and efficiency standards for this industry. Because of some of the lack of transparency, we really don't know. What are the best practices? What are the best methods for cooling data centers?  Other industries, we sort of understand this, and we have a sense of what might be a best practice. 

Right now, we know that data centers don’t necessarily require potable finished drinking water, and so states could be exploring ways to allow for non-potable reuse and setting those standards for this industry.