COUNCIL ITEM REQUEST FORM
The Council Item Request Form is for members of the City Council to submit written requests to the City Manager’s Office for inclusion of an item on a future City Council meeting agenda. At the meeting where the initial written request is heard, discussion should be limited to whether the item should be added to an agenda and a date, not the merit of the item. A majority vote of the City Council is required for the item to be added to future Council meeting agenda for action.
CONTACT INFORMATION
Requesting Member of City Council
Contact E-mail
Contact Phone
Today’s Date
WRITTEN REQUEST
I, , hereby request that the following item
be placed on the City of Santa Clara Council and Authorities Concurrent meeting agenda:
Reference: Council Policy 030 – Adding an Item on the Agenda Resolution No. 23-9278
The City of Santa Clara is home to 58 data centers which is only limited by the lack of transmission to supply power current and future data centers. SVP is investing heavily to expand the transmission and distribution to support almost double the data center load.
Recently there has been a lot of opposition Nationwide to building data centers primarily because of Climate impacts and water usage. Some cities have even passed moratoriums on the construction of data centers (Seattle, Denver, Madison, Oklahoma City) In the last update of Santa Clara's Climate Action Plan, the Council mandated that all new data centers be carbon neutral with the ability to purchase offsets or RECs. There was little or no opposition by the data centers and it addressed the climate change impacts from CO2 emissions for the electricity being consumed.
Many of the cities that passed moratoriums were deeply concerned about water usage by data centers for cooling. Many of the newer data centers in Santa Clara have minimal water consumption and serve as models for data centers nationwide. However, Santa Clara does not have an official policy limiting water use by data centers.
I hereby request that Santa Clara create a policy which limits the type of water used by data centers and the quantity of water used by future data centers. There should also be a discussion regarding participation in any future DSGS (Demand Side Grid Support) program by the CAISO or State of California.
For reference, the 2024 EIR for the 2805 Bowers Data Center states: "The BDC could require water when outside air temperatures approach design (89 degrees Fahrenheit) to augment its adiabatic cooling system using evaporative pads on the rooftop air-cooled chillers. The data center would be designed to use up to 0.5 acre-feet per year (AFY) of recycled water via the proposed recycled water pipeline extension, and a potable water connection would be provided as a back-up source to the recycled water system in the interim period." By comparison, A typical single family residence uses 0.3 to 0.5 acre feet of water per year so this 72 MW data center uses less than 2 families of water for cooling.