Five gigawatts of power is one of those numbers so enormous it’s impossible to make any sense of. A data center using five gigawatts is simply meaningless numbers to us. Developers, on the other hand, see the potential for huge profits without looking at the realities of the situation.

My home power usage averages approximately 2,000 kilowatt-hours a month. I’m on the high side because of my air conditioning (absolutely necessary in Texas), the power required to pull water from my well (also necessary), and the complete lack of gas appliances. But what exactly is a kilowatt-hour?

Power bills are measured in kilowatt-hours: one thousand watts for one hour, one watt for a thousand hours, or any combination in between. Back when my father was yelling at me to stop leaving all the lights on, it was easy to visualize. Ten 100-watt light bulbs burning for an hour equaled one kilowatt-hour. Then LED lighting came along and ruined a perfectly good example. Now it takes nearly a hundred LED bulbs to get the same picture. Progress has a way of making explanations harder.

The space heater at my desk consumes roughly a kilowatt-hour of power in about forty minutes. Technically that’s energy, not power, but since my power company sends me a power bill each month I’m not going to quibble about details. It’s also the closest reference I have to a full kilowatt hour.

Imagine, if you will, a hundred penguins lined up for dinner. Now increase that number to one thousand. Honestly, did the picture in your head change very much? Probably not. Human beings are surprisingly bad at visualizing large quantities. Once we get beyond a few hundred, our brains start replacing actual understanding with something that amounts to, “Yep, that’s a lot.”

Power is even worse because we insist on measuring it in multiple ways just to keep things interesting.

Here’s where it gets tricky. My 2,000 kilowatt-hours are accumulated over an entire month. Divide by 30 and you get about 67 kilowatt-hours per day. Divide by 24 and you discover that my house averages slightly under 3 kilowatts of continuous power consumption. My wife told me I’d regret buying that third monitor.

A megawatt is 1,000 kilowatts. Unless it’s Christmas and you’re attempting to outdo the Griswolds while simultaneously signaling aircraft, you’re unlikely to consume a megawatt at home.

A gigawatt is 1,000 megawatts.

At that point, we’ve entered the realm of numbers that people nod thoughtfully at while having absolutely no idea what they represent.

Now think about a 5-gigawatt data center.

That’s not 5 gigawatts spread out over a month. That’s not 5 gigawatts on a particularly busy Tuesday afternoon. That’s 5 gigawatts every hour of every day, continuously. It never takes a coffee break. It never goes on vacation. It doesn’t decide to cut back because the electric bill looks a little high this month.

Compared to my house, that’s roughly 1.8 million times more power consumption. Constantly. I don’t know about you, but that still exceeds my visualization capability. Let’s break it down further.

Assume they’re achieving 90% efficiency, which is wildly optimistic. That means 4.5 gigawatts are doing useful work—web searches, AI training, cartoon generation, cat videos, and all the other critically important activities of modern civilization.

The remaining half gigawatt? Heat. Just heat.

A half gigawatt of heat is roughly equivalent to four hundred thousand home space heaters running on High at the same time.

Still hard to visualize.

My space heater at my desk occupies about eight inches by eight inches of floor space. Using the state bird of Texas (a football), we end up with roughly four football fields completely packed with space heaters running full blast.

Four footballs fields, completely packed with space heaters running full blast, all the time.

Still difficult to visualize but more importantly would you want to buy a house anywhere near four football fields full of space heaters? Or worse, watch it move into your neighborhood

Neither would I.

And before someone confidently informs me that the heat will simply “dissipate,” that’s exactly what worries me. Heat doesn’t disappear. It goes somewhere. Nature is annoyingly strict about that.

There is no conceivable way a data center can simply let that amount of heat accumulate around the electronics. Fans alone aren’t going to solve the problem. At some point you’re trying to cool a small artificial sun.

Ever hear of a swamp cooler?

It cools air through evaporation and then uses fans to move that cooled air around. It’s remarkably effective, which is why sweating works so well for humans.

Now imagine those four football fields again.

Except instead of space heaters, picture them filled wall-to-wall with very hot people. Standing room only. Everyone sweating profusely in a desperate attempt to avoid heat stroke. Oh, almost forgot, everyone is holding a space heater running at full blast. Sounds vaguely reminiscent of something.

Now you know why data centers need all that water.

To handle all that waste heat, enormous quantities of water must be evaporated while giant fans move vast amounts of hot, moist air away from the facility.

In other words, they’re creating an industrial-scale version of a humid Florida in August and then acting surprised when the neighbors aren’t thrilled.

Add enough water and airflow and they’re halfway to constructing their own private Everglades. All they need are alligators, pythons, and a few tourists in Hawaiian shirts asking where the airboat tours depart.

Massive heat, fan noise, hot, humid air.

And just in case you’ve forgotten what warm, moist environments are famous for, they’re also excellent breeding grounds for insects, mold, mildew, fungi, and every other life form that hears the phrase “high humidity” and immediately starts planning world domination.

Yet somehow we’re expected to believe everyone living within 20 miles should be delighted. After all, what’s not to love about having a giant artificial weather system move in next door?

Someone advised me, I should end on a positive note. As I look at all these heat farms being built in drought stricken high temperature areas, I’m forced to realize these businessmen already know these are not sustainable models.

Two things come to mind, the dot.com boom (and bust) and the apartment glut scandals in the DFW area, when businesses were borrowing money to build apartments, only to walk away before completion. The construction companies pocketed the money and left DFW with a skyline of unfinished apartments. I have to wonder just how many of these data centers will ever become fully operational.

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Today’s song from Songer… Heatwave of Data

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