46 DECEMBER 2025 WorldWide Drilling Resource® Data Centers: What They Do and Don’t Do by Britt Storkson Owner, P2FlowLLC Lately, there’s been some controversy about computer Data Centers - their locations and their value relative to what they contribute. It’s true, data centers require lots of electric power and water to operate. The electric power is used to transmit and maintain the data stored in the data center and the water is used mainly for cooling the power supply components which normally produce heat during the power conversion process, and the heat must be removed to prevent damage to the components. So what is a Data Center? It’s very simple; it is a repository for data - where the data “lives” so to speak. All data has to have a physical location. The location may be in the United States or at any number of locations all over the world. When you search or select something on the Internet or click on an icon, the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) “finds” or “fetches” this information and brings it to your computer screen/system. All of this happens at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second), so it doesn’t really matter where the data is located. What really matters is it can be found among the trillions of other data entries available on the Internet. Data centers lease data space to a wide variety of industries and organizations, and that’s how they make most of their money. The process is quite simple on the surface, but making it happen is a real challenge as a number of things must be coordinated in real time. Data centers are one of the cleanest, if not the cleanest, industry our planet has ever known. They do not use harmful chemicals, they don’t burn anything, and there is very little in the way of waste which must be disposed of. Most of the electric power they use is converted to direct current which is used by the computers that manage this data. This alternating current to direct current conversion is done using diode bridge rectifiers that output about one watt of heat per amp per phase. The sum total of the heat output of the diode bridge rectifiers must be removed, and that’s how most of the water is used - to transfer the heat from the energy conversion process out to the atmosphere. The “smoke” one sometimes sees coming from a data center is most likely steam or water vapor coming from the cooling towers. Most car alternators have similar cooling systems except they use air cooling and fins to dissipate the heat. These perform the exact same function as the energy conversion process in the data centers. Are military secrets or strategic information stored in data centers? There probably is, but of course the content and the quantity of the data is a big secret. Even if there was super-secret information stored there, it would probably be encrypted and/or stored in multiple places for redundancy. Can data centers compromise national security? Since data centers are inanimate objects, they can do only what their managers tell them to. Data centers are much more like a storage warehouse than a nefarious machine that can be unleashed to cause havoc. Of course, in the wrong hands, data centers can support military action which could be a problem, but data centers are more like tools that can be used for good or evil - like just about everything. There’s a lot of data center construction going on right now, but like most everything, the market will sooner or later get saturated and the construction will decline to more realistic levels, or focus on maintenance and system improvements. Britt Britt Storkson may be contacted via e-mail to michele@ worldwidedrillingresource.com See us at Booth 1934 Groundwater Week 2025 in New Orleans Can be found this month online: https://www.media. worldwidedrillingresource.com/ educationconnection_Dec25.pdf Education Connection
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