Data Centres and Water Demand - with Kristen Atha, Executive Director, City of Columbus, Ohio

[00:00:00] Piers Clark: Welcome to the Exec Exchange, 15-minute podcast in which a leader from the water sector shares a story to inspire, educate, and inform other water sector leaders from across the globe. My name is Piers Clark and my guest today is Kristen Atha, the Director of Public Utilities at the City Columbus, and we're going to be talking about the challenges that come with providing water to data centers. Kristen, wonderful to have you.
[00:00:23] Kristen Atha: Thanks for inviting me, Pierce. It's great to be here with you.
[00:00:27] Piers Clark: Now, we always start with a bit of background on our podcaster. You, Kristen, have been involved with five major international engineering water firms, and if I go all the way back, I see that you started life as an intern, here in my own beloved country in the UK at Yorkshire Water. How'd you start life in the water sector as an intern at Yorkshire Water before you got to where you are today.
[00:00:48] Kristen Atha: It actually was probably one of the best things that ever happened to me. Pierce, I, early in my career I got a business degree from Miami University here in the great state of Ohio and started off in development. After about a year of working for a developer here in Ohio, I, as a 22, 23-year-old, decided I needed to change paths. And I had always been really interested in the environment and in water. I grew up spending the summers on my grandparents’ farm. And had the opportunity, through some friends of our family, to come to Leeds, England and work for six months at Yorkshire Water. Trevor Newton, who was the managing director at Yorkshire Water in the nineties, went through a lot of the different privatization. Trevor and my father were friends. And so, Trevor actually invited me to come and serve an internship there for six months. And I had the opportunity to work at one of the wastewater treatment plant expansion projects that was going on at the time. And then I did work on a project at one of the big reservoirs. A reservoir construction project that was going on at the time, there was a claim by the contractor over the geotechnical conditions, and I did the research that helped to support Yorkshire Water's case, and they ended up not having to pay the claim.
[00:02:09] Piers Clark: I'm going to see a line of sight that takes you from an internship at Yorkshire Water through to being director of public utilities at the City of Columbus. That was the moment that inspired you.
[00:02:21] Kristen Atha: I think that's a fair statement. The first phone call I made after I was appointed was to Trevor. And really it changed my life. It changed the trajectory of my career and gave me a calling to this work and really to public service, even though it took me a while to actually come back to the public service side of the work. All throughout my career, I worked with municipal utilities and I've loved it all. I also think that working as a consultant for 30 years and having the experience to work with many different public utilities around the United States helped inform how I lead here at the city of Columbus. And has provided me the opportunity to maybe ask different questions and think about things a little bit differently than someone who's been in the public side for 30 years. I also just feel so grateful to be bookending my career in this way. So, it's been an amazing ride.
[00:03:15] Piers Clark: When did you join the City of Columbus?
[00:03:18] Kristen Atha: About three years ago, May of 2022.
[00:03:21] Piers Clark: And now let's talk about the City of Columbus. How many people does it serve, and are you doing both water and wastewater?
[00:03:26] Kristen Atha: Yes, so the city of Columbus is about a million people, but our service area is about 1. 5 million. We serve the city and also about 26 suburbs and the entire region is growing very rapidly. So, our service area keeps getting bigger and bigger. So, we serve about 1. 5 million people and we have a water, wastewater, and power utility. So, we have all three. Our power utility is much smaller than our water and wastewater service area. We serve more of the central part of the city and then we also provide power to our treatment facilities We have over 7, 000 miles of water distribution main and about 5, 000 miles of sewers and tunnels. We have two large wastewater treatment plants and three water treatment plants. We are in the process of designing our fourth water plant. We provide, on average, about 155 million gallons of water a day to the region and then treat a little bit more than that on the back end.
[00:04:29] Piers Clark: The topic we want to talk about today is data centers; the demands that they're creating on the water network. So, let's understand the context of the problem or the opportunity that you've got in Columbus.
[00:04:41] Kristen Atha: It's not so much of a problem. We have been working really diligently with our suburban neighbors and with the region on where data centers are going to be located and how we're going to serve communities where they have data centers. I have had to have some hard conversations with some communities when they're bringing in a data center. We're very conscientious about our ability to serve and how much water we can provide to our contract community. Always looking at that and updating folks’ contracts as data centers continue to come to the region. A number of the data centers that are coming into our region are also outside of our service area. So, while we've got, many of them coming to central Ohio, I think I read yesterday that we've had over $23 billion of investment by Amazon Web Services in particular, but we've got all of them, they're all coming to central Ohio.
[00:05:35] Piers Clark: What draws them to central Ohio?
[00:05:37] Kristen Atha: I think lower risk as far as, looking at the climate where we have some extreme weather, but we're not California or Arizona; we have more abundant water. I think our water rates are probably a little bit more reasonable than some of those places. And when you look out over time, I think we're more resilient and our housing costs are lower. The quality of life here is really good. We have many great universities. The Ohio State University is right here in Columbus. Lots of highly skilled workers coming out of school so good labor force. And Intel is also building a semiconductor fab here as well. A lot of big water demands and that's why we're building a fourth water plant right now. We do have abundant water in the middle of the state, but we are not on a great lake like they are in Cleveland. One of our biggest concerns is, as the demand continues to increase in the region, how do we continue to meet that demand and not put ourselves in a position where we're needing to have conservation efforts or raise rates dramatically. We're always thinking about affordability.
[00:06:45] Piers Clark: Help me understand the scale of the amount of the water that's going to the data centers and the chip manufacturing in the proportion of the total amount of water that you supply, how much of it goes to those industrial applications?
[00:06:56] Kristen Atha: Phase one of Intel, for example, is going to require 5 to 6 million gallons a day. Right now, our average per day is 160. That in particular is a pretty small percentage now when they're fully built out, which could be 20 years from now, they're going to require 20 million gallons a day. Technologies change. We're encouraging some of the data centers to consider using recycled water. And right now, we're doing a study as a utility to look at how we could build a water reclamation facility that would provide more design water to those facilities and looking at some of the areas of town where there are more data centers and seeing where we might provide purple pipe with recycled water as opposed to our drinking water. So, looking at kind of the full suite of supply.
[00:07:44] Piers Clark: At the moment, you supply water to a million to 2 million people. You've got industry coming and individual clients might only be demanding 5 million out of 160 million. It's 2, 3 percent of the total that you're producing. But of course, it doesn't take many of those till you're suddenly facing double digit increase with it potentially moving up to being over the next 20 years, maybe a third of the total water could go to these industrial sectors if innovations aren't adopted. You're looking at other options, including can you recycle the water? Could you get people to reuse the water on site or indeed use wastewater as part of the cooling. And it's cooling that is the biggest issue for the data centers. Of course, it's high purity water they'll need in chip manufacturing.
[00:08:25] Kristen Atha: That's right. For Intel, their water will come from our drinking water system because they do need the high purity water and they'll treat it additionally after they receive water from us. But with the data centers we understand that they could use a design water or recycled wastewater for their cooling. And, part of the way that the data centers use water is they may need a lot of water certain times of the year, but then other times of the year, they really don't need much water. In Ohio, we have many months that are very cool. We're still in one right now! The demand from the data centers isn't constant. That's another thing that we need to keep in mind, we don't want to build up all this supply for them when they're not going to use it all the time. That's something that we're really looking at, too, and encouraging the data centers to look at ways that they can use less water.
[00:09:13] Piers Clark: Let's talk about how the public and your staff are responding to this change in the mix. I assume that lots of the public will have their jobs hanging off the recent influx of data centers. Are they embracing this or do they see the data centers as stealing their precious water resource?
[00:09:28] Kristen Atha: I think there's a mix when it comes to the public perception. When development comes to central Ohio and folks talk about Amazon investing money or Microsoft or the different data centers investing money in our communities, I think folks get excited thinking about new opportunities. But the reality is they don't come with a lot of jobs. I think the papers tend to focus on the construction jobs that come with those developments. But the long-term reality is each one maybe comes with 15 permanent jobs, maybe a few more than that. The reaction to that by the public is part of the equation of, we're getting all these gigantic data centers, but there aren't a lot of people working in those buildings. When it comes to the water side of the equation, our staff, we certainly are concerned about how are we going to meet the needs. And because it isn't a constant need, thinking about how to appropriately size our facilities and our infrastructure when you've got to plan 10 years out for the construction of a water plant, and it's a huge investment. I think for my team and our staff; that's the challenge is how do we make the right decisions and invest our rate payers’ dollars in the best possible way.
[00:10:40] Piers Clark: You've got the added dynamic of what happens if Amazon decide that they're going to go to a different state or they adopt a technology that might no longer require water cooling of their data centers, but they can embrace other things. How much are they talking to you about their development plans and how much they're prepared to commit so that you're then able to commit to supply them?
[00:11:01] Kristen Atha: We talk with all of those entities as they come to town and as they start to look at what technologies they're going to be using and what kind of supply they need. It is a concern that they've come, technologies change they don't need as much water. I think that one of the benefits in central Ohio is our population is continuing to increase. So those things will balance each other out as we grow and as technologies change. And I think there's a lot of innovation in that ecosystem. They're always looking for ways to innovate and use less water and meet their ESG goals, which is part of looking at water reuse in our region. And we've had numerous conversations with all the different data centers about public-private partnership and how can they invest money to help us build a water reuse facility that could help supply some of their needs?
[00:11:50] Piers Clark: If there's got to be new assets being built to serve them, then they need to pay for those assets and if they then decide to go to a different state, you're then not left holding a metaphorical baby that you had to invest in.
[00:12:03] Kristen Atha: We've been looking at our rates also. And the rate that we use with the data centers as a separate rate that's different from our regular user rate.
[00:12:12] Piers Clark: It's a higher rate?
[00:12:13] Kristen Atha: Yes.
[00:12:14] Piers Clark: Kristen, it's wonderful to connect with you because I think this problem that you're experiencing where you serve the public and you've suddenly got big industry coming in, in a very short time period, and demanding potentially 10, 20, 30 percent more of your water resource. How you manage your assets and indeed your watersheds to supply that is an incredibly complex challenge. And I think what I'm hearing is you do it by trying to understand all the different spinning plates, trying to keep all of them in check whilst at the same time maintaining conversations with all of the leading parties so that you can get as much visibility as to what their plans are for the future.
[00:12:53] Kristen Atha: I agree. That's the real challenge and hearing all the different voices that are part of that conversation and making sure that we're gathering all of that together to put the right path forward.
[00:13:03] Piers Clark: I think the answer has to be that data centers need to find ways of getting cooling without using copious amounts of water. That feels to me like the North Star that we should be shooting for.
[00:13:13] Kristen Atha: I completely agree.
[00:13:14] Piers Clark: Kristen, if you could go back to before you had gone to Yorkshire Water and taken that internship, what advice would you give yourself?
[00:13:22] Kristen Atha: I would tell myself not to be afraid to ask difficult questions and test the limits of whatever challenges ahead and make sure that I'm listening to everyone, but also, just not being afraid to push the envelope and take a chance.
[00:13:37] Piers Clark: You have been listening to The Exec Exchange with me, Piers Clark, and my guest today has been Kristen Atha, Director of Public Utilities at the City of Columbus, and we've been talking about the exciting challenges and opportunities that come with data centers when they come into your region. Thank you for listening.