It's not that simple.

Drinking water comes from three reservoirs: https://metrovancouver.org/services/water/reservoir-levels-water-use

• Capilano
• Seymour
• Coquitlam

Only the Coquitlam dam is impacted by hydro use: https://metrovancouver.org/services/water/watersheds-reservoirs

The water use planning for Coquitlam can be seen here: https://www.bchydro.com/toolbar/about/sustainability/environmental_responsibility/water-use-plans/lower-mainland/coquitlam-buntzen.html

The diversion for drinking water (MVWD) is downstream the power houses, meaning drinking water diversion is limited by power generation. Further, this station is used for auxillary and peaking because they are not efficient/old.

Sidenote: the trails at the Capilano reservoir are magical ✨ I ended up there by accident a few years back and nwas blown away. Accessible by public transit too!

Hold on... A few things stand out to me.

Why do you think they want people to buy energy? (Regulated)Hydro companies always want people to conserve electricity because it means they don't need to be constantly upgrading the transmission grid.

Secondly, what would they be diverting water to? Who is they? Hydro may physically control the dams and valves but if you are saying the water needs to go to the data centre when the water is going to come from Metro Van water department, in which case the city does get a say because development is only approved if there is enough capacity. If the data centre is using a lot of water, so much so that it will impact HydroBC in terms of lower reservoirs, it's going to be a massive demand in the city run water service.

If you have questions about how these things are controlled I'd be happy to help answer them using the public documents from these utilities.

~~Hydro supplies the water?~~

Sorry, I was wrong in assuming this was an error. I didn't realize overuse of reservoirs was a factor in the capacity.

But I don't understand which way you think they will lean?

Oh! Thanks for the correction.

Electricity was stupid expensive in the 90s in Ontario so it made sense to invest in cogeneration engines to burn digester gas or even natural gas and use the electricity on site. Then electricity got cheaper so it still made sense to burn biogas generated on site to lower your peak demands especially if you were paying time of use or you were Class A and needed to do load shedding. Sometimes you'd even get a discount from the electricity company for running your systems because it meant they could delay increasing the grid.

Now, the financial incentive is for carbon credits. You don't get those if you burn on site, you just get to buy less taxed fuels. If you instead upgrade the gas to renewable natural gas (like what is described in the article) and put that in the natural gas grid, you can sell the carbon credits to companies who are required to offset their own generation. I think that is where the money is in these schemes.

(That and the tipping costs for food waste, free slowly digesting material to regulate the digesters in the form of the manure, outsourcing the annoying regulatory bits to the farmers, and building goodwill for green data centres)

Isn't that what DDG uses?

Help America? Nothing. I'm not american.

Help utilities in my own country? I'm doing my job, lol.

In my experience it is super location dependent. I've worked with municipalities who had shit locked down and others that made me think I was getting punked. All in Ontario.

I joined the industry in the early 2010s and it was a hot topic then too. This was when Stuxnet was in the news. ISA published Industrial Automation and Control Systems Security standards (ISA99) in 2002. It's not new.

I wonder how connected the folks who make decisions about utility cyber security are to each other. I learned almost everything I know about SCADA security practices via people I met through provincial wastewater industry associations and just letting them infodump lol. I don't know that any of the municipal SCADA people I worked with were members or participated. Maybe they are just trying to go at it alone vs collaborating and learning from each other. You don't know what you don't know!

I'd also be interested to know how old the PLCs at that plant were. We have zero details about this attack but when the Rockwell/AB exploit was in the news people were talking about buying cards off eBay because they are using discontinued PLCs. Can you imagine?

So, even if the staff understands the risk it doesn't mean they are getting enough money to do anything about it. Utilities are so underfunded. It's another ticking time bomb along with all those neglected pipes in the ground.

I don't think we are going to see eye to eye on this. We are reading the quotes differently. I'll try one more time.

All from this article: https://thecitizen.com/2026/05/14/the-qts-water-story-is-real-its-just-not-about-qts/

And referencing this letter: https://protectpwc.org/2026/05/05/13786/

There are actually three meters:

• 8" domestic, not given a meter number, on Tyrone road.
• 10" fireline (23006232), highway 54
• 10" fireline (23006231), Tyrone road

The letter says the 8" domestic was installed without inspection, and that the fireline on highway 54 was not hooked up to the account and the fire line on Tyrone road was using more water than allowed and therefore a higher rate will be charged. That's 27.5 MG unbilled and 13.2 million at the 'wrong' rate.

Rapson, Tigert’s boss and the county’s top appointed official, has now told The Citizen on the record that the central claim in that letter is not accurate. County staff did inspect the meter at installation.

This accounts for the 'illegal hookup". The "central claim" is that there was a meter that was not inspected. This person has indicated that the meter was inspected.

Tigert herself has hedged her own letter publicly. She told E&E News, the Politico-owned outlet that broke the national story, “I may have hit ‘send’ too soon.” She acknowledged in the same piece that her staff may have known about the hookups, but that she had not been able to locate the inspection report.

She did not know about the hook up and inspection. She assumed there was no inspection because she could not locate the report.

I was wrong about the leak audits, I was looking at the wrong line of the reports. I will correct my comments.

I can see how you could read it like that but it has been further clarified:

Rapson, Tigert’s boss and the county’s top appointed official, has now told The Citizen on the record that the central claim in that letter is not accurate. County staff did inspect the meter at installation. Rapson’s exact words were, “It’s not like they put a meter in, threw a camel net over it, and we didn’t know they put the meter in.”

The same quote, without explicitly stating the meter was inspected, could be ambiguous. Further:

"Tigert herself has hedged her own letter publicly. She told E&E News, the Politico-owned outlet that broke the national story, “I may have hit ‘send’ too soon.” She acknowledged in the same piece that her staff may have known about the hookups, but that she had not been able to locate the inspection report."

The letter was such a mess. You can't use private fire fighting lines for non fire fighting purposes. It makes no sense the conversation would just be "oh we didn't bill you", not "you need to stop."

The following section was incorrect, I was looking at the wrong line on the audit spreadsheet.

(Begin correction)

The board's meeting minutes are similarly goofy.

The person who wrote this has no clue what they are talking about. The cost per unit water doubled because half the water production was unbilled. Their "leakage index" was 7.01 in 2024, up from 3.46 in 2023.

(End correction)

YIKES

They haven't met since March.

Tl;dr: the utility clarified there was no unauthorized connection, and wow they are absurdly understaffed I'm not surprised this is such a mess

Statewide, between 2010 and 2015, the estimated water use by hog farmers increased 116 percent (from 2.26 to 4.9 MGD). Within the livestock category, the greatest water use could be found in beef (15 MGD) and dairy (9.6 MGD) operations. The water use estimates for goats, sheep, horses, and broiler chickens all declined. The region with the greatest increase in animal water use (by percentage) was in the Altamaha region, and the greatest decline in animal water use was in the Coastal region.

https://www.gawater.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/GWC_Watering_GA_Report.pdf

The three named uses add up to 29.5 MLD, which is 129% the total capacity of the Lafayette water system production capacity. 😬

I might also suggest that a public sector dedicated to balancing the resident water demands and industry water-use demands could improve the rate/volume of consumption. But that would require a public voting base / private executive staff that valued the long-term health of the state rather than the short term economic growth of the local neighborhoods.

I think what most people are missing is that the water consumption was unmetered. Let me put it this way: the water plant knows how much water it's making at any instant, but there is a huge delay in knowing what the "revenue flow" is. There is always loss in the system between what is produced and what is billed.

I don't know this specific system, but if they couldn't detect the pressure loss without customer complaints, it wasn't some catastrophic increase in demand. As an example, water main breaks with uncontrolled lost flow are detected in the distribution system when pressure cannot be maintained or local pumping stations are running nonstop to maintain pressure. Low pressure is a safety issue so it gets investigated asap, and increased pumping will probably get flagged as suspicious or at least someone will need to explain why the electric bill is so damn high.. Utilities have leak detection tools they can use, and this would have been deployed if there was evidence of a sudden huge increase in demand because the symptoms would have been the same as a leak.

What is more likely is that the mismatch between production and billed flows was being audited and the local complaints about water pressure was the clue that helped them identify the culprit.

We can look at water loss reports here: https://epd.georgia.gov/watershed-protection-branch/water-efficiency-and-water-loss-audits

Their 2024 Infrastructure Leakage Index (ILI) was 7.02 with a validity score of 71, with the 2023 and 2022 results being 3.46 (70) and 3.37 (66). I'll bet that lit a fire under some bodies ass!

Articles on the topic contain statements like:

“We get this notification from Fayette County water system saying you need to stop watering your lawns to help conserve water,” said James Clifton, an attorney and property rights advocate who obtained and shared the 2025 letter to QTS.

“So the first thing they do is lean on the individuals and the citizens to stop water consumption when we have QTS that’s just absolutely draining us — most months it’s the No. 1 consumer of water in the county,” said Clifton, who is also running for a seat on the Fayette County Board of Commissioners.

It really annoys me that this is shared without analysis. The instruction to stop water lawns is entirely unrelated to the data centers water use.

The systems planning documents show the water sources are sufficient for the projected demand in 2070, but the production capacity (treatment plants) needs to be expanded. Even though there were a lot of losses in 2024, the system was still opening in their capacity. Local pressure losses are a reflection of local bottlenecks, not overall system capacity issues.

Further, the water conservation is mandated by the Metro North Georgia Water Planning District and their Water Resource Management Plan which:

requires that Fayette County Water System develop an irrigation pricing schedule that recognizes the impact on peak demand from irrigation.

These restriction have been in place since at least 2007, according to my tired eyes.

Anways, I'm not trying to defend the data centre. I'm just annoyed with all the misinformation about this specific case. The root cause is likely administrative.

While not the case for this specific county, things like non municipal water supply for industries including animal agriculture are a massive risk to water sheds. These water users are subject to far fewer audits and checks, so if they are withdrawing more than permitted they are unlikely to get caught. Water tables drop and municipal supplies are impacted, but again without the means to identify the cause.

Attention on this specific case and all the misinformation about it is a distraction from other massive water users and their impact.

ETA: https://thecitizen.com/2026/05/11/behind-fayettes-qts-water-controversy-a-missed-meter-8000-workers-and-a-massive-construction-project/

Lol, it was a comms failure