Story by Rodger Nichols for Gorge Country Media
A ribbon-cutting Wednesday marked the formal transfer of a $28 million Aquifer Storage and Recovery facility from Google to the City of The Dalles. Google’s newest data centers in The Dalles sit on land that once belonged to Martin Marietta Aluminum, and included two wells. As part of a program to ensure ample water supply for both Google and the population of The Dalles, the company has signed over the water rights to those wells to the city, and spent $28 million on the aquifer facility. Google’s data center utility strategy manager, Anthony Giovannone explained how it works:
“The city can collect water during the rainy season,” he said. “They can treat that at their water treatment plant, and if there’s excess water, they’re able to replenish the aquifer straight from their system, and store that back down in the ground. They can then, through the same well, pull that water back out and recover during a drier season and send it to end users. It’s a savings account underground for water.”
He also answered a question on many local resident’s minds – Will this be enough to cover the water needs as the two new Google plants come on line? The answer is yes, and more so.
“This system,” he said, “built in combination with the water rights donated by Google, is expected to provide over 100 million gallons of highly reliable and accessible water annually to the community. And I want to be very clear that that 100 million gallons annually, is above and beyond what will be needed for the Google data centers. And we do believe that that’s actually a low estimate.”
Dale McCable, Public Works Director for the City of The Dalles said the new facility worked with remote controls and would require the city to hire any more people to run it.