{"id":3327,"date":"2026-10-26T08:15:54","date_gmt":"2026-10-26T12:15:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/?p=3327"},"modified":"2026-10-26T08:15:54","modified_gmt":"2026-10-26T12:15:54","slug":"byron-donalds-poopy-water-data-center-plan-flawed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/?p=3327","title":{"rendered":"Byron Donalds’ ‘Poopy Water’ Data Center Plan Flawed"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Byron Donalds, a Republican candidate seeking to succeed Ron DeSantis as governor, has floated the idea that using reclaimed water to cool data centers is the answer to environmental objections to these facilities that has become a campaign issue in many places because of water shortages caused by overexploited aquifers.
But there is a big problem with his idea.
Many of the data center proposals are occurring in rural areas where there is no access to sewer lines of any kinds.
Additionally, in many parts of the state, reclaimed water is already committed to providing cooling water to power plants or for landscape irrigation.
In addition, the data center cooling water demand is only part of these facilities environmental impact, though you would not know that from listening to Donalds, whose campaign has been heavily funded by data center interests, and local officials such as Polk County Commissioner Bill Braswell, who parrot the MAGA party line about how great they are and how worthy they are of millions of dollars in property tax breaks.
That impact is the demand for additional cooling water at power plants to handle the gigawatts (that’s billions of watts) of power demand the hyperscale data centers will require if they are built.
Democratic candidate David Jolly by contrast wants to slow down the onslaught of data center applications to give regulators time to make sure the public and the environment are protected.
That offers voters interested in this issue a clear choice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Byron Donalds, a Republican candidate seeking to succeed Ron DeSantis as governor, has floated the idea that using reclaimed water to cool data centers is the answer to environmental objections to these facilities that has become a campaign issue in many places because of water shortages caused by overexploited aquifers.But there is a big problem […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gci"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3327"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3327\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3331,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3327\/revisions\/3331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}