Two fears come up almost every time a data center is proposed: that the local treatment plant will get overwhelmed, and that existing customers will end up paying for the upgrades. Both are reasonable worries. The answers aren’t complicated, but they’re rarely explained.
Servers Don’t Flush Toilets
A data center building is full of equipment, not people. A campus that takes up more square footage than a shopping mall might have only a few dozen staff on-site at any given time — technicians, security, maintenance.
That matters because sanitary sewer load is driven by people, not buildings. The wastewater coming out of a data center is essentially what you’d expect from a small office with a break room: bathrooms, handwashing, a kitchenette. It’s closer to a suburban dentist’s practice than to a factory, a hotel, or a subdivision of the same footprint.
So if the worry is a treatment plant getting overwhelmed by the sheer volume of wastewater from a data center, the math doesn’t support it. The plant barely notices.
The One Real Exception
There is one case where a data center does produce meaningful wastewater: older, water-cooled facilities. Those systems use evaporative cooling towers, and periodically they have to discharge mineralized water — called “blowdown” — to the sewer. It’s manageable and regulated, but it’s real, and it’s worth naming honestly.
Air-cooled and closed-loop designs don’t have blowdown. That’s one of the reasons Beale’s development policy prioritizes air-cooled facilities as the default, with water-cooled used only where alternative water supplies (like reclaimed water) make it appropriate.
Who Pays When Upgrades Are Needed
Sometimes a project does require real infrastructure improvements — a new main, expanded capacity, a lift station. The question most community members actually want answered is: does that cost land on my bill?
The straightforward answer, and Beale’s stated policy, is no. When a development triggers infrastructure upgrades, the developer pays for them. In many cases the completed infrastructure is transferred to public ownership, becoming a permanent asset for the community.
The Honest Caveat
None of this is automatic. Outcomes like The Dalles happen because agreements were structured with clear cost-sharing, transparent ownership terms, and protection for existing ratepayers. Communities are right to ask hard questions: Who pays? Who owns the result? Will a rate study be done to make sure current customers aren’t affected?
Those are exactly the right questions. And they’re ones any developer should be willing to answer in writing.