On this dispatch, we talk with Pam Kenel who is the Director of Water Resources at Loudoun Water. Loudoun Water is just west of Washington DC and provides drinking water and wastewater services to over 80,000 households in Loudoun County.
So not a lot happened in maybe the first five years. And then all of a sudden, this explosion of growth began and these data centers are using this reclaimed water for cooling. So as of right now, I think we have about 35 customers.
Pam Kenel
We talk about how one transatlantic data cable caused an explosion of data centers which dramatically influenced Loudon Water’s water supply. We also talk about how reusing quarries for water supply will be an important part of their future water supply and how this will be important for other water utilities on the East Coast.
Transcript
Robert:
She tried to mold me. And she did her best.
Pam Kenel:
We had some great, grand times, didn’t we?
Robert Osborne:
We did. Welcome to the Outfall. This is Robert. On this dispatch, David, Amy and I talk with Pam Kenel, who’s the Director of Water Resources at Loudoun Water. Loudoun Water is just West of Washington DC, and provides drinking water and wastewater to over 80,000 households in Loudoun County. We talk about how one Transatlantic data cable caused an explosion of data centers, which dramatically influence Loudoun Water’s water supply. We also talk about how reusing quarries for water supply will be an important part of their future water supply and how this will be important for other water utilities on the East coast. Pam was a mentor to me throughout a good portion of my career and inspired my own interest in water resources. Enjoy.
Pam Kenel:
There happens to be a lot of reliable power. There happens to be a Transatlantic cable that can carry the data across the ocean to Europe. So sort of that backbone infrastructure existed in this area. And so right now, we are having an explosion of data centers being developed in Loudoun County, Virginia. There’s some statistic that like 75 to 80% of the world’s internet traffic is rooting through this area of Loudoun County. And as you know, it isn’t like your data just goes to one place. So it’s flowing all the time. But honestly, the capacity that there’s 80% of it that is kind of cruising through Loudoun County is amazing.
Pam Kenel:
What’s sort of interesting about this is along the way, an infusion of money into the economy because of the recession that we’d had. And do you remember there was a time that there were shovel ready projects and the shovel ready projects were getting money.
Robert:
That was the thing. Yes.
Pam:
Yeah. Right? So one of the shovel ready projects was a pipeline that Loudoun Water Authority had designed and they were waiting for the good time to build a reclaimed water pipe. And the reclaimed water pipeline was built. In the very beginning, it just connected to customers. So not a lot happened in maybe the first five years. And then all of a sudden, like I said, this explosion of growth began and these data centers are using this reclaimed water for cooling. So as of right now, I think we have about 35 customers.
Robert:
Wow.
Pam Kenel:
And the majority of them are using it for cooling and as the technologies improve, what data centers are doing is they’re taking that same square footage and they’re trying to put more, they’re squeezing more capacity into the same square footage. So we used to estimate how much water they were going to require by the square footage of the racks that they were putting in there. And now, those ratios keep changing. So it’ll be interesting to see how our reclaimed water demands continue to increase as these data centers continue to move in.
Pam Kenel:
So the thinking had always been that there would be more storage to add, but the flattening of the demand curve across the region made it much less of an emergency. Nonetheless, the region has still been looking at, okay, where would we add storage? And so the latest initiatives by several of the water suppliers have been to look at quarries, retired rock quarries. Well, and not all of them are retired, frankly. So in Loudoun County, we have a mining company that has four separate pits in Loudoun County. And Loudoun Water has worked to develop sort of an agreement, memorandum of agreement, with them and has taken over as of last year, one of the pits, the smallest one that will, when everything’s ready to be operated, it should hold about 1.4 billion gallons of water. And it’s the baby of the four pits that they have.
Pam Kenel:
So there’s an agreement that out into the future, that as the pits are retired, that they will be made available for water storage. So, Loudoun Water has been working, gosh, with these guys for a couple of decades now trying to set this up and putting it into place. But likewise, there’s another one across the river that Montgomery County is working on. And then farther South near the Occoquon facilities, Fairfax Water is also working with one of their mining owners down there to take over half of one of their pits. So they’re going to actually leave kind of a rock berm in the middle of a very, very large pit so that the Water Authority can take over use of the small half while they continue to mine out the rest of it.
Pam Kenel:
Even though the demand pattern has been pretty flat for the last few years, the big concern that we have is climate change and how climate change might actually change the historic patterns that we’ve been using to compare the demands to kind of forecast what our risk is.
Robert:
So this might be a little bit off-topic, but I thought mining was out West and in remote locations. What’s all this mining that’s occurring, right by our nation’s capital, so to speak?
Pam Kenel:
Isn’t it interesting?
Robert:
Yeah.
Pam Kenel:
It’s like, who would know, because you don’t actually, I never knew any of these places were out there. So the first thing that we have is incredibly hard rocks. This is like a granite type of a rock, but most of the ones that I’ve been mentioning, most of them crush it and sell it for road construction projects. So because of the development here and the continual building of roads, it has been supporting this mining. It’s just aggregate, aggregate that gets crushed and gets plowed into most of our roadways in the area-
Robert:
Oh, okay.
Pam Kenel:
Which is why they don’t like to go away. We, I guess in the water business, building infrastructure, we always want to start something and get it completed. And with these mining companies, they don’t actually ever want to leave. So they’ve got a pit going, they just kind of, they would prefer to leave it dormant for a while until the rock gets more expensive so that it becomes economical for them to dig deeper. Because as the deeper they get, assuming it’s still there, assuming they have enough rock. But you start getting pretty deep and it gets expensive trying to extract the rock and bring it all the way back up because the one that I’m talking about, that Loudoun Water has taken over, is 300 feet deep. So, you start getting pretty deep.
Robert:
I guess there’s got to be some economics there comparing cost of going deep to cost of going far away and hauling it from another State or whatever.
Pam Kenel:
That’s exactly what it is. That is exactly what it is. It’s pure economics. Because to be honest, the aggregate is just not bringing in that much money. It’s really, it’s quantity. It’s quantity and it’s all about location.
Robert:
Yeah. Super interesting.
Pam Kenel:
Yeah. Yeah. So, and then the more I looked at these rock quarries, and I started to look across, around the East coast, when we were, Robert and I were looking at water resources, projects elsewhere. It was amazing to see in the Piedmont, how many of these quarries actually exist. I think there’s opportunities for these query reservoirs everywhere.
David Ladner:
And what makes them effective is just to do a regular reservoir, a smaller version of Lake Hartwell, would take 10 to 15 years to permit. And so a quarry like this, what do you think, Pam, to permit? Maybe two, three years? I don’t know.
Pam Kenel:
If you’re just talking about the quarry part of it and not the infrastructure, you just have very few impacts. The mitigation plan, if you will, for a quarry owner typically is to fill it up with water and then they can kind of walk away and they don’t have to do much. So there’s some work that needs to be done. If you’re going to convert it into a facility that people are going to need to access, there’s some rules about stabilizing walls and that sort of thing. But in terms of what we’re used to in constructing a reservoir that would have surface water impacts, wetland impacts, habitat impacts, you don’t have any of those in permitting a quarry.
Robert:
Thanks again for listening to the Outfall and giving us great feedback. A big shout out to Miss Margaret for a fantastic review on Apple podcasts. We’re humbled. This is fuel for what we do. We do this for fun. At the end of the day, it’s our little way to give back to this great water community. Do you have a good story idea for us? Do you want to be on the show? Go to our website, the outfall.com and leave us a comment. We’d love to hear from you.
Robert:
Saw this maybe on LinkedIn or somewhere. Someone had made up a conference call about Bingo.
Amy Anderson:
Yes. I saw that. It was good.
Robert:
Did you see that?
Amy Anderson:
Yes.
Robert:
And it looks like all the little phrases on there. Like, are you still there? Or, I’m like, “Oh, wow. I think I could actually play bingo in a given day.”
Amy Anderson:
Oh yeah. Here’s a card. And there’s even a call over button and yeah, you’re on mute. Is everybody here? Baby crying. Two people with the same name. Call me after we hang up. Win-win. Inappropriate comments.
Robert:
Well, awesome, Pam. Thank you.
Amy Anderson:
Okay.
Pam Kenel:
All right. Thanks a lot. Take care, guys.
Robert:
All right. Be good.
Amy Anderson:
Yeah, bye. Thank you, Pam.
Robert:
Bye-bye.
