How Much Water Have Local Governments Promised to Data Center Companies?
Using FOIA, Columnist Eric Bonds uncovers how much water some projects in Spotsylvania and Stafford and projected to use.
By Eric Bonds
COLUMNIST
Reasonable and good people have different opinions about data centers. Some view them as a positive force of economic development and local tax revenue. Others are opposed to their proliferation because of their significant environmental impacts and because they can degrade the quality of life for people living next door. Many others, I suspect, see data centers as a mixed bag or a necessary evil.
Whatever our differing opinions on data centers, most of us can agree that the public needs complete information about the costs and benefits of data center development so we can collectively arrive at the best decisions. Unfortunately, this industry has often sought to downplay or conceal its environmental impacts, including its use of water.
Local governments have often been willing partners in secrecy, keeping information hidden from the public at the companies’ behest. Inspired by events over in the Roanoke region where a reporter won a recent court ruling requiring more data center transparency, I decided to try and shine some light on the industry’s water use in our part of the state.
Data Center Water Use
Many large data center complexes are cooled in the summertime with water delivered from public utilities or local governments. At first most of this water is potable, or tap water. Eventually, much of this water will be treated wastewater, and the data center companies pay to build the water reuse systems. So it’s a kind of recycling. It sounds pretty good.
But there are downsides, one of which is that we are talking about a lot of water. At the peak of summer, one data center complex can use millions of gallons of water a day. Perhaps the biggest concern is that a great deal of this water—around 60%—is lost due to evaporation. This is water that is no longer available for downstream users or aquatic ecosystems.
This is why it would be good to know how much water local governments are promising data center companies in our area so we can get a wholistic picture across our region and try to understand potential cumulative impacts. All too often, however, governments say that they can’t share this information, claiming that it is a proprietary trade secret, and must not be disclosed.
Seeking Transparency Through FOIA Law
Spotsylvania County has three service agreements for water reuse systems to cool data centers. Stafford County has one such agreement (that I know of). When these agreements were approved, the amounts of water that will be delivered were redacted, or blacked out.
In late December, I submitted Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests asking for the complete, unredacted documents. Both counties responded by sharing the same redacted documents that were already publicly available, claiming that the water-delivery data was the companies’ proprietary trade secret and, consequently, could not be disclosed.
Fortunately, Virginia FOIA law has a citizen enforcement mechanism that allows residents of the state to petition a judge to intervene and determine if public records are being unlawfully withheld. I decided to take Spotsylvania County and Stafford County to court to obtain this information. I drafted a petition to explain to a judge that “the provision of a public utility is an activity of government. A private company cannot claim to own a government service or activity and keep it secret.”
When I shared my petition with Spotsylvania County and gave my intent to sue, the local government quickly responded by sharing three complete and unredacted water service agreements.
In Stafford County it looked like the case might actually go before a judge. But on the day before our court date this past Tuesday, the County sent me the previously redacted data center water service agreement that it previously refused to share.
How Much Water?
Through the release of Spotsylvania County’s water service agreements, I learned that the Mattameade Amazon Data Service complex will receive a maximum of 1,980 gallons per minute after the water reuse system is built. This translates to about 2.8 million gallons a day. Another water service agreement for the Cosner Tech campus allocates up to 1,260 gallons of water a minute, for about 1.8 million gallons a day. The third agreement, for the Powerhouse 95 data center complex, will allocate a maximum of 700,000 gallons a day.
In Stafford County, the water service agreement with STACK Infrastructure at the Stafford Technology Campus shows that a maximum of 3,600 gallons of water will be delivered a minute, or around five million gallons a day.
The water service agreements I received were annotated by an employee at Amazon, stating that the company plans to use air, not water, for cooling most of the time, which will make them much less water intensive. The maximum amount of water promised in these water service agreements will rarely be needed, the Amazon annotation says. This total amount of water will only be used on the hottest days of summer, or about 4.1% of the year.
I will note, however, that these are Amazon’s current expectations, and that expectations can change over the course of a long-term agreement. Looking through the document, I do not see any limits in the water service agreements that restrict the allocated maximum water use to only 4.1% of the year or that call for Amazon to prioritize air cooling over water cooling.
Data center proponents downplay the industry’s water use. But these newly released documents reveal that we are talking about significant allocations of water. As a point of reference, the Town of Culpeper also has a water system agreement for a large data center complex that will allocate two million gallons of water a day to the company. That’s about all of the wastewater produced by the entire town of 20,000 people.
Fredericksburg also has approved zoning for a data center complex that, if built, will require another significant water allocation through an additional not-yet-written water service agreement.
What Does It All Mean?
Even if we disagree about the best path forward with data centers, we all know that water is a precious resource that’s shared across political jurisdictions. Consequently, allocation decisions are best made after a public study is conducted of potential environmental impacts across a region, not in a piecemeal locality-by-locality fashion.
And despite our differences of opinion on data centers, we might also agree on the importance of public participation in the management of water resources. Local governments should strive for transparency. It shouldn’t take a looming court date to convince them to share full records of the water-allocation decisions that they’ve already made.
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The Rappahannock River is not an especially large waterway and water resources in general are not infinite. It would be useful to know how proposed allocations for data center line up with available resources and current permitting, which carefully considered both instream and offstream uses.
Fantastic piece, and fantastic puncturing of the "trade secret" wall. Thank you for your tenacity.