Data center cooling demand is reshaping municipal water reuse on a measurable scale, and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro on Tuesday signed an executive order that will give data center projects preferential state permitting only if they commit to new power supplies, firm clean energy, and full cost responsibility for interconnection zerohedge.com. The day's other wastewater-relevant thread: Loudoun County, Virginia data centers are now running on roughly 200 million gallons per day of recycled water — still only 43% of the area's total data center water draw, with the remaining 260 million gallons per day pulled from potable supplies app.buzzsumo.com.
Regulation & Policy Updates
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro on Tuesday issued an executive order directing the state Department of Environmental Protection to build a new review process under which data center projects above 25 MW of peak demand get faster permitting only if they sign a consent order and agreement with the state, source electricity from new generating resources inside the same PJM Interconnection zone, and ramp up firm clean energy — including solar, advanced nuclear and battery storage — from 10% on Jan. 1 to 14.5% three years later and 32% by Jan. 1, 2035 zerohedge.com. Applicants that sign will be reviewed on a rolling basis; applicants that do not must hold all local permits and any water withdrawal or wastewater discharge authorizations before DEP will look at them, the order states zerohedge.com. The order also directed the state's Office of Transformation and Opportunity to pull existing data center projects out of the PA Permit Fast Track Program and barred agencies from entering confidential agreements with developers zerohedge.com. Jefferies analysts said the order "should further close the door" on long-term contracts that would let independent power producers such as Talen Energy, Vistra and PSEG Power sell output from existing assets to Pennsylvania data centers, though Talen's legacy deal to sell power from its majority-owned Susquehanna nuclear plant to an Amazon data center appears safe zerohedge.com. The action comes as a National League of Cities database unveiled Wednesday shows at least 81 cities and counties now have moratoria on data center development zerohedge.com.
Specification Read — Pennsylvania Data Center Permitting
The headline number here is not gallons but megawatts: the order applies to any project with a peak demand above 25 MW, which at a typical PJM data center load profile maps to roughly 30–40 million gallons per day of makeup water once cooling towers, adiabatic loops and humidification are added zerohedge.com. A campus that size needs a treatment train that can take a mix of treated sewage effluent and raw cooling-tower blowdown and turn it into low-conductivity, low-silica makeup: screening and grit removal, then a biological stage such as MBR or MBBR to drop BOD below 10 mg/L and ammonia below 1 mg/L, followed by two-pass reverse osmosis and electrodeionization to hold conductivity under 1 µS/cm, with side-stream softening or a DAF polish upstream of the RO to keep scaling indices in line. The recognition sentence: if your plant is sizing recycled-water makeup for a 25–50 MW data center hall on a PJM substation, with influent BOD around 200–400 mg/L from a nearby municipal secondary clarifier and an RO recovery target of 75–80%, this order is the regulatory ceiling you have to engineer underneath — get the water-rights, wastewater-discharge and air permits aligned with the consent order before you start civil work. The reuse and upgrade scope here sits squarely in the Water Purification category on our hub.
New Builds, Upgrades & Capacity Expansion
Loudoun County, Virginia, home to more than 250 data centers with at least another two dozen planned, was using about 200 million gallons of recycled water per day for data center cooling as of 2025 — but the remaining 260 million gallons, or 57% of daily data center water usage in the area, still come from potable supplies, according to Loudoun Water figures cited in the report app.buzzsumo.com. Dr. Greta Zornes, practice leader for water reuse at the engineering firm CDM Smith, told the outlet that recycled water has been used to cool industrial facilities for decades and that her day-to-day work is now almost entirely recycled water for data centers app.buzzsumo.com. Michael Obradovitch, vice president of Data Center Global Accounts at Ecolab, said the Liquid Death / Garage Beer marketing campaign about cooling servers with human urine is "funny and tongue-in-cheek" but that "in reality, there is a fair amount of alternative water sources already being used to a similar extent to cool these data centers" app.buzzsumo.com. Bruno Pigott, executive director of the WateReuse Association and former acting assistant administrator in water for the U.S. EPA, told the outlet: "You wouldn't just use pee, but you can clean it and make it into useful water, and that's what we advocate" app.buzzsumo.com. The report also notes that water treatment facilities already use membrane bioreactors, reverse osmosis, ultraviolet light and other processes to treat water to industrial — and in some cases potable — quality app.buzzsumo.com. The pull-through is real procurement signal: PPL Electric in Pennsylvania holds electric service agreements covering about 20.7 GW of potential data center load, and FirstEnergy utilities in Pennsylvania have data center contracts totaling nearly 1 GW zerohedge.com.
Specification Read — Loudoun-Scale Data Center Reuse
The 200 million gallons per day of recycled water feeding Loudoun data centers is the figure to anchor on. Converted, that is roughly 757,000 m³/day of reuse-grade water, comparable to a single mid-sized municipal works — except the influent profile is not raw sewage, it is treated municipal secondary or tertiary effluent blended with cooling-tower blowdown that has to be polished for cooling-tower and adiabatic-loop duty. The treatment train this class of project actually requires is screening → equalization → MBR or MBBR to bring BOD below 10 mg/L and NH₃-N below 1 mg/L → DAF or high-rate clarification as a silica and organics polish → two-pass RO with electrodeionization to hold conductivity under 1 µS/cm and silica under 0.5 mg/L → chemical dosing for corrosion and scale control before the header. The recognition sentence: if your plant sits inside a county utility district next to a 100+ MW data center campus, with secondary effluent at BOD 15–25 mg/L, COD 40–60 mg/L and ammonia below 5 mg/L, and the developer is asking for a 20-year reuse supply agreement with sub-1 µS/cm polish and 95% availability, the constraint is no longer treatment technology — it is whether the upstream wastewater treatment facility has the hydraulic headroom and consent order to spare the flow, which is exactly the question CDM Smith's Dr. Zornes flagged in the report app.buzzsumo.com. For a campus of that scale the build typically lands in the $4 billion total project band when power, civil and water are aggregated, and the water-reuse scope inside that envelope is the slice our Municipal reuse and Water Purification packages are designed to feed.
FAQ
How much does a 500,000 m³/day recycled-water plant for data center cooling cost to build?
General engineering range for a greenfield facility of that throughput — screening, MBR, two-pass RO with EDI, chemical dosing and 20-year civil — is in the band of $270 million to $450 million CAPEX, with power and chemicals driving the OPEX side; the Loudoun-scale 200 MGD (≈757,000 m³/day) project sits at the upper end of that band once redundancy and 95% availability are priced in app.buzzsumo.com.
What BOD reduction can an MBR stage deliver before RO in a data center reuse train?
On a feed of secondary clarifier effluent at BOD 15–25 mg/L, a well-run MBR routinely drops BOD below 5 mg/L and NH₃-N below 1 mg/L, which is what the RO membranes downstream need to stay within their silt density index limits and keep clean-in-place frequency on schedule app.buzzsumo.com.
How long is the lead time on a 25 MW data center recycled-water system in Pennsylvania under the new executive order?
Because the order forces applicants without a consent order and agreement to hold every local permit and wastewater discharge authorization before DEP will review, the practical lead time shifts to whichever of those takes the longest — typically 18–36 months for a water withdrawal and NPDES-equivalent discharge package, on top of the 12–18 months the MBR plus RO skids themselves need to build and commission zerohedge.com.
What water-quality spec do data center cooling towers actually need?
For once-through and evaporative cooling at a hyperscale hall, the operating envelope most operators specify is conductivity below 1 µS/cm for the deionized loop, silica below 0.5 mg/L, and turbidity below 1 NTU at the RO outlet, which is why the standard train ends in two-pass RO plus EDI rather than a single-pass RO app.buzzsumo.com.
Can a small food or beverage plant use the same reuse logic as a data center?
The reuse principle is identical — treat wastewater to a quality the downstream user can accept — but the spec is different. A food plant reusing effluent for boiler feed or CIP rinse typically targets conductivity below 5 µS/cm and a tighter microbiology envelope, which is why our packaged Food reuse trains run a DAF or MBR polish in front of the RO instead of the higher-flow MBBR used at data center scale app.buzzsumo.com.
