Central Texas’ booming population and a plan to share Bell County’s lake water with communities to the south have many local residents concerned about the future of the Temple area’s drinking water.
But at least one company, Meta, says it won’t use as much local water as previously expected.
Experts say a rapidly growing population and summer drought are taking a toll on water supplies. The temple and surrounding area are in the midst of a growing region, with more than 55,000 new residents moving to Bell, Coryell and Lampasas counties in the past five years, and an additional 58,000 expected by 2028 It has been.
But some locals are more concerned about the use of their water by large corporations than by new families. For example, Meta has a history of using large amounts of water, and many worry that drought or extreme heat could further stress Lake Belton.
Daniel Scott, public facilities director for the city of Altoona, Iowa, said the city’s metadata center uses up to 1 million gallons of water each day, about one-fifth of the water Altoona can produce on its own. He said it was equivalent. This prompted the city to look for alternative water sources.
But Melanie Lo, a spokeswoman for the social media giant, said such uses will not occur at the Temple Meta facility. Roe said Temple’s data center is expected to draw much less water from local sources.
“Thanks to recent design changes, new data centers at Temple and several other locations will use new dry coolers that use less water to cool large numbers of computer servers.” said Mr Law.
“We don’t have exact numbers because the dry cooler system is not yet operational,” she said.
In late 2022, after months of construction on the Temple data center, Meta paused construction on local facilities and data centers in Idaho and Alabama, as well as eight other projects around the world. Other improvements such as intelligence and dry systems for cooling servers.
There are also concerns about the amount of water used by Niagara Bottling, a major company that provides bottled water nationwide. Calls and emails sent to Niagara by the Temple Daily Telegram were not returned by press time Saturday.
Scheduled for March 24th: 2024 Lake Week articles begin.
