The cooling towers at Arclight Data’s hall outside Fenmark run day and night, drawing municipal water at a rate that, on paper, alarmed the town’s public works department the first time officials saw the number: 2.1 million gallons a day, roughly 38 percent of Fenmark’s total treated water capacity.
The hall opened three years ago under a permit that set no specific cap on water use, an omission Fenmark’s town council has spent the last eighteen months trying to correct.
“Nobody on this council in office at the time understood what a facility like that would actually draw,” said council member Ines Faraday. “We approved a zoning permit. We didn’t fully grasp we were approving a fifth of our water system.”
The renegotiation
Arclight Data agreed last month to a revised water agreement after months of closed-door negotiation, capping its daily draw at 2.3 million gallons, a figure the company frames as a ceiling rather than a target, and committing to a recycled-cooling upgrade expected to cut consumption by close to 30 percent once installed.
“We came to the table because we want to be a neighbour here for the long term, not because a lawsuit forced us to,” said Arclight regional director Casper Lindqvist. “The recycled system is a real capital investment on our end.”
Faraday credits the agreement as progress but notes it locks in a ceiling close to current usage rather than a meaningful cut, at least until the recycled system is built, a project with no firm completion date.
“A cap that sits right where we already are isn’t a reduction,” she said. “It’s a promise to not get worse while they build something that will take a reduction later.”
What the town gets in return
The agreement includes an annual payment from Arclight to Fenmark’s water infrastructure fund, set at 400,000 a year, intended to offset the cost of capacity the hall’s draw effectively reserves. Public works director Halvard Osei says the payment covers roughly a third of what a comparable capacity expansion would cost the town to build itself.
“It’s not nothing, and it’s not enough,” Osei said. “It buys us breathing room. It doesn’t buy us a second water source.”
Fenmark’s population has grown by around 12 percent since the hall opened, driven partly by construction jobs and permanent technical staff the facility brought with it, adding further pressure to the same water system the hall now shares.
Lindqvist said Arclight was open to further investment in Fenmark’s water infrastructure beyond the current agreement “if the growth trajectory continues in a direction that requires it,” language Faraday found short on specifics when she read the company’s public statement.
“That’s a sentence that commits to nothing,” she said. “I’d rather have a number.”
For now the towers keep running, drawing their share of a town’s water supply under a cap that both sides describe, in their own way, as a start rather than an answer.
