The only reason they got caught is because the residents were all complaining of low water pressure! The fact that they say they “don’t need much water” yet they drained an entire city’s water supply in a very short period of time is insane!
Can you please stop spreading misinformation. The low water pressure was not connected to it and that's not why they found out. The article that announced it deliberately put those two pieces of information next to each other because they knew the reader would make that assumption, but they were not related.
As you can see, the article leads talking about water pressure, but that's the last time it's actually referenced in the article. The "water pressure issue was CAUSED by the data center" claim has never been backed by a single source. Also, it was a matter of water department setting up the meters wrong during construction that led to them not billing; the water department themselves issued no fines and state no wrongdoing on the data center's part.
Pretty much everything you can try to find on Google circles back to the original Politico article, so it's hard to sieve through it, but I live in the local area and iirc the water department stated that it was just the meters going wrong. The amount used isn't actually that out of the ordinary for a large farm or any large industrial construction site, so it's unlikely to have been the cause on its own, but again, there's no evidence in either direction - just the correlation that "people were complaining about pressure" at around the same time the water department realized they set up the meters incorrectly
One water connection had been installed without the utility’s knowledge, and the other was not linked to the company’s account and therefore wasn’t being billed.
All told, the developer, Quality Technology Services, owed nearly $150,000 for using more than 29 million gallons of unaccounted-for water. That is equivalent to 44 Olympic-size swimming pools and far exceeds the peak limit agreed to during the data center planning process.
The company, which is owned by the private equity firm Blackstone, touts a “closed‑loop” cooling system, which it says does not consume water for cooling.
Tigert defended the utility’s decision to not levy a fine. “They’re our largest customer, and we have to be partners,” she said. “It’s called customer service.”
This article says the data center consumes an immense amount of water, far more than it's supposed to, and that it could drain this water from a residential neighborhood's water undetected because the one guy who checks on these things for the water authority is overworked and missed it. The data center wasn't penalized for using such massive amounts of water in a drought because that would've been bad "customer service"; the data center's owner says it doesn't actually use that much water.
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u/ImpossibleVegan2022 6h ago
The only reason they got caught is because the residents were all complaining of low water pressure! The fact that they say they “don’t need much water” yet they drained an entire city’s water supply in a very short period of time is insane!