Apple, known for its polished smartphones and antiseptic stores, is getting into the wastewater business.
The company confirmed last week that it has agreed to pay for a treatment facility to re-use water for evaporative cooling in its Prineville data centers. By recycling water for Apple instead of taking it straight from the tap, the city says its new facility will save nearly 5 million gallons a year.
And the treatment center will have the potential to expand considerably to serve new data centers or other industries that might come to Prineville.
"They're doing this simply because we came up with a project that we can benefit from and they can benefit from," said Prineville Mayor Betty Roppe.
Apple declined to say how much it will spend on the facility, but Prineville said it expects the company's tab will run into the "millions of dollars."
The recycled water will come from the city's regular sewage treatment system, water that would otherwise have been less rigorously treated before being used at the city's golf course or flow to pasturelands or into the Crooked River. The city says it has other water rights that provide adequate supplies for those other purposes.
Apple is already Prineville's top water user, gulping down 27 million gallons of water in the last year, according to city estimates. The company has a massive, 338,000-square-foot data center on the bluff above town, some modular facilities, and is building a second, large-scale building. It owns 200 more acres nearby with capacity for considerable expansion.
Prineville said Apple's ongoing construction inflated last year's water consumption, but neither the city nor the company would provide forecasts of how much water the data centers themselves use.
Apple's data centers play a crucial role in the company's online photo storage, video and music streaming, and its FaceTime video chat and iMessage texting service. The company touts its use of wind energy to power the Prineville data center and said the wastewater treatment center is a manifestation of its environmental stewardship.
"We are proud to partner with Crook County and the City of Prineville on this effort, and are committed to doing our part to preserve natural resources," Apple said in a written statement.
Facebook, which also has a complex of Prineville data centers, uses about 10.5 million gallons of water a year to cool its facilities, most of that drawn from wells on its property. The company has talked informally about tapping the greywater, too, but has yet to sign on.
Oregon is among the most attractive destinations in the country for large data centers because it doesn't have a sales tax on the pricey computers that run server farms and offers property tax breaks on the equipment.
Apple's exemptions in Crook County were worth $4.5 million last year, according to county records. Data center electricity use generated franchise fees of nearly $1.4 million for Prineville last year, approximately one-sixth of the city's general fund.
Apple has 130 employees and contractors working in Prineville, along with 300 construction workers building its new data center.
The new treatment facility will be west of town, adjacent to Prineville's existing water treatment plant. It will treat wastewater to a level rated clean enough to drink, according to the city, but the water won't go back into the city's general water supply. Instead, Prineville will pipe it back up the hill to Apple's facility.
In addition to re-using water, the city said the treatment center will reduce the mineral content inside Apple's data center - enabling the company to use it longer for cooling before sending it to the new facility for treatment.
Prineville expanded its water capacity a few years ago to handle the influx of data centers, according to city manager Steve Forrester, but he said the city anticipated water constraints could limit further economic growth.
So city engineers looked to wastewater recycling as an opportunity to expand the city's industrial capacity and attract more businesses.
Prineville isn't talking with any new data center companies right now, Forrester said, but he said the new treatment facility could help Prineville attract other industrial users that use high water volumes, such as biomass electricity generators and sawmills.
"That is a huge advantage that a little community of 10,000 (residents) doesn't usually get to participate in," Forrester said.
-- Mike Rogoway
mrogoway@oregonian.com
503-294-7699
@rogoway