Many are looking at cooler climates to put data centers in to allow more hours of free cooling.  One downside of a cool climate is freezing weather.  Who cares?  What if your pipes are frozen and burst?

MSNBC has an article on Belfast Ireland’s lack of fresh water.

Thousands without fresh water in N. Ireland

Water crisis stretches into ninth day after frozen pipes burst following cold spell

Peter Muhly  /  AFP - Getty Images

Some 40,000 people are struggling to cope without water supplies in Northern Ireland, where frozen pipes have burst leaving some without fresh water for nine days. People have been forced to join long queues for bottled water.

BELFAST — Northern Ireland's government will hold an emergency meeting to address the country's mounting water crisis as tens of thousands of people remained without water for a ninth day.

Engineers are struggling to repair pipes that burst after the recent cold spell's sudden thaw.

Long lines formed Thursday at emergency water points, and Scotland trucked in bottled water for distribution to help families. Doctors are warning that a lack of clean water for drinking and washing could cause a health crisis.

Pressure is mounting on state supplier Northern Ireland Water (NI Water), the company at the center of the crisis, to restore service.

If you think you could truck in water, you may find the government has all the tankers booked.

Government ministers will discuss the possibility of bringing in more water tankers as officials say it could take several days to fix the problem.

And, you may find the rate of tankers you would need is unsustainable if you need multiple days of supply.

I have heard a few stories of data centers shut down when a water main breaks, and one of these days it will be in the news as a major IT data center is shut down due to lack of water.

I’ve heard of data centers shutting down due to water main problems.  The availability of water is going to diminish around the world.  MSNBC reports on a computer model showing record droughts.

Future droughts will be shockers, study says

1970s Sahel disaster will seem mild compared to areas by 2030s, models project

Courtesy Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews, redrawn by UCAR

This map illustrates the potential for drought by 2039, based on current projections of future greenhouse gas emissions. The map uses the Palmer Drought Severity Index, which assigns positive numbers when conditions are unusually wet, and negative numbers when conditions are unusually dry. A reading of -4 or below is considered extreme drought. Blue or green regions will likely be at lower risk, while those in the red and purple spectrum could face more unusually extreme drought.

Increasing drought has long been forecast as a consequence of warming temperatures, but the study from the National Center for Atmospheric Research projects serious impacts as soon as the 2030s. Impacts by century's end could go beyond anything in the historical record, the study suggests.

How bad are the numbers?

To get an idea of how severe droughts might get, scientists use a measure called the Palmer Drought Severity Index, or PDSI. A positive score is wet, a negative score is dry and a score of zero is neither overly wet nor dry.

The most severe drought in recent history, in the Sahel region of western Africa in the 1970s, had a PDSI of -3 or -4.

By contrast, the study indicates that by 2100 some parts of the U.S. could see -8 to -10 PDSI, while Mediterranean areas could see drought in the -15 or -20 range.

"Historical PDSI for the last 60 years show a drying trend over southern Europe but nothing like those values at the end of this century," Dai said. "Decadal mean values of PDSI have not reached -15 to -20 levels in the past in any records over the world."

What areas are at risk?

Areas likely to experience significant drying include:

• the western two-thirds of the United States;
• much of Latin America, especially large parts of Mexico and Brazil;
• regions bordering the Mediterranean Sea;
• large parts of southwest Asia;
• southeast Asia, including China and neighboring countries;
• most of Africa and Australia.

Maybe putting a data center in Canada isn’t a bad idea?

While Earth is expected to get dryer overall, some areas will see a lowering of the drought risk. These include: much of northern Europe; Russia; Canada; Alaska; and some areas of the Southern Hemisphere.

Water is a precious resource.  Newsweek  has a long article on “The New Oil” water.

The New Oil

Should private companies control our most precious natural resource?

Ethan Miller / Getty Images

Click to view a gallery about how we're losing our lakes.

Losing Our Lakes: Precious Resources at Risk

Sitka, Alaska, is home to one of the world’s most spectacular lakes. Nestled into a U-shaped valley of dense forests and majestic peaks, and fed by snowpack and glaciers, the reservoir, named Blue Lake for its deep blue hues, holds trillions of gallons of water so pure it requires no treatment. The city’s tiny population—fewer than 10,000 people spread across 5,000 square miles—makes this an embarrassment of riches. Every year, as countries around the world struggle to meet the water needs of their citizens, 6.2 billion gallons of Sitka’s reserves go unused. That could soon change. In a few months, if all goes according to plan, 80 million gallons of Blue Lake water will be siphoned into the kind of tankers normally reserved for oil—and shipped to a bulk bottling facility near Mumbai. From there it will be dispersed among several drought-plagued cities throughout the Middle East. The project is the brainchild of two American companies. One, True Alaska Bottling, has purchased the rights to transfer 3 billion gallons of water a year from Sitka’s bountiful reserves. The other, S2C Global, is building the water-processing facility in India. If the companies succeed, they will have brought what Sitka hopes will be a $90 million industry to their city, not to mention a solution to one of the world’s most pressing climate conundrums. They will also have turned life’s most essential molecule into a global commodity.

Lack of water is going to take out more data centers.  Think about this.

In the U.S., federal funds for repairing water infrastructure—most of which was built around the same time that Henry Ford built the first Model T—are sorely lacking. The Obama administration has secured just $6 billion for repairs that the EPA estimates will cost $300 billion. Meanwhile, more than half a million pipes burst every year, according to the American Water Works Association, and more than 6 billion gallons of water are lost to leaky pipes. In response to the funding gap, hundreds of U.S. cities—including Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Santa Fe, N.M.—are now looking to privatize. On its face, the move makes obvious sense: elected officials can use the profits from water sales to balance city budgets, while simultaneously offloading the huge cost of repairing and expanding infrastructure—not to mention the politically unpopular necessity of raising water rates to do so—to companies that promise both jobs and economy-stimulating profits.

Of course, the reality doesn’t always meet that ideal. “Because water infrastructure is too expensive to allow multiple providers, the only real competition occurs during the bidding process,” says Wenonah Hauter, executive director of the nonprofit, antiprivatization group Food and Water Watch. “After that, the private utility has a virtual monopoly. And because 70 to 80 percent of water and sewer assets are underground, municipalities can have a tough time monitoring a contractor’s performance.” According to some reports, private operators often reduce the workforce, neglect water conservation, and shift the cost of environmental violations onto the city. For example, when two Veolia-operated plants spilled millions of gallons of sewage into San Francisco Bay, at least one city was forced to make multimillion-dollar upgrades to the offending sewage plant. (Veolia has defended its record.)

The smart people are looking to reduce water use in the data center as one of the biggest cost risks and availability  issues is water.

If you don’t think water prices will change.

The bottom line is this: that water is essential to life makes it no less expensive to obtain, purify, and deliver, and does nothing to change the fact that as supplies dwindle and demand grows, that expense will only increase. The World Bank has argued that higher prices are a good thing. Right now, no public utility anywhere prices water based on how scarce it is or how much it costs to deliver, and that, privatization proponents argue, is the root cause of such rampant overuse. If water costs more, they say, we will conserve it better.

A green data center needs a low water strategy.

DataCenterKnowledge reports on Google's use of Sea Water in its Hamina, Finland data center.

Google Using Sea Water to Cool Finland Project

September 15th, 2010 : Rich Miller

Google will use cool sea water in the cooling system for its new data center in Hamina, Finland, which is under construction and scheduled to go live early next year. The initiative continues Google’s focus on data center efficiency and sustainability. Using cool water allows Google to operate without energy-hungry chillers, and also limits the facility’s impact on local water utilities.

Where there is money savings there is typically less waste.  So, will this allow Google to go below 1.10 PUE?

Here are Google's latest numbers for Q1 2010.

Q2 2010 Performance

Quarterly energy-weighted average PUE:
1.17

Trailing twelve-month energy-weighted avg. PUE: 
1.18

Individual facility minimum quarterly PUE:
1.13, Data Center J

Individual facility minimum TTM PUE*:
1.13, Data Center B

Individual facility maximum quarterly PUE:
1.22, Data Center A

Individual facility maximum TTM PUE*:
1.23, Data Center H

* Only facilities with at least twelve months of operation are eligible for Individual Facility TTM PUE reporting

For more details on Google's latest data center construction.

The company’s plans were discussed in an article in Computer Sweden (translation inEnglish), which got a tour of the construction site in Hamina. There are no servers in sight yet, but the story reports that Google has refurbished the water pumps used at the former newsprint plant, and will use large pipes to draw cool water from the nearby Baltic Sea.

Google has a great goal for reducing its water consumption.

Google hopes to eventually use recycled water for up to 80 percent of the company’s total data center water consumption. “The idea behind this is simple: instead of wasting clean, potable water, use a dirty source of water and clean it just enough so it can be used for cooling,” Google says on its water management web page. “Cooling water still needs to be processed, but it’s much easier to treat it enough for data center use compared to cleaning it for drinking use.”