Quincy hunting for money before deadlines

QUINCY — Quincy city officials are hunting money for its water reclamation and reuse facility before state and federal deadlines.

If the deadlines aren’t meant, 1,000 jobs could be in jeopardy, because two data centers, a future data center and Columbia Colstor wouldn’t have a place to put water from their cooling towers, according to city records.

The city recently finished the first phase of the project to carry reclaimed water from its municipal wastewater plant to the Microsoft data center. The phase was paid for with a $4 million state grant.

The next phase of the project extends the pipe to the Yahoo!, Intuit and future Sabey data centers as well as Columbia Colstor. A future phase connects the system to the industrial wastewater plant.

A Department of Ecology (DOE) permit allowing the data centers to process water used in their cooling towers at the municipal wastewater plant ends in 2013, said Scott Mallery, a DOE engineer consulting on the project.

“We’re still working with them (city staff),” he said.

When Yahoo! and Intuit proposed the centers, they proposed to build in three phases, Mallery said. If the centers were fully built, they would send 2.5 million gallons a day to the municipal wastewater plant when all three phases were completed. The municipal plant is designed to handle 1.5 million gallons a day.

“We limited them (the data centers) to one phase,” he said.

The limit means the centers send about 200,000 gallons a day to the treatment plant in the summer. This comprises about 20 percent of the 900,000 gallons a day the plant processes, Mallery said. Except for salts the water is clear, creating the possibility of disrupting the treatment process because it doesn’t carry the same bacteria residential wastewater does.

“There could be a possibility of the plant not doing what it should do,” he said.

The other problem is the municipal system is not designed to eliminate the salts carried from the cooling towers. The chemicals pass through the system without being treated and can end up in the aquifers.

The City of Quincy is facing a 2015 deadline, imposed by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, to change permitted water handling practices.

Bill Gray, the bureau’s assistant area manager, said the bureau is working with the city, so businesses can stop sending cooling tower water into the irrigation system before the permit expires. The permit has been in place since the 1960s.

The water could lead to a water quality issue, he said.

“This is an opportunity for us to look at other options and say, ‘What’s the best way to handle this,’” Gray said. “Our basic policy is we don’t want to accept any kind of returns … Generally, it makes it easier to manage the system if you control all of the inputs.

City Administrator Tim Snead said the city is hoping to comply with both deadlines by connecting the two remaining data centers and Columbia Colstor to the system during the second phase of the project.

The city recently applied for a $1 million grant from the Community Economic Revitalization Board, to help pay for the estimated $2.1 million project. Gray and Osborne Principal Larry Julius said the city plans to use the $500,000 remaining from the state’s grant for the first phase and wants another $600,000 in the state’s budget. 

When the system is finished, the wastewater will be sent from the industrial wastewater plant and returned there, creating a circle, Snead said. Excess water would be sent to a brine pond.

Once the data centers are connected to the industrial wastewater plant, they will be able to expand, he said.

Engineering plans to use water from the industrial wastewater plant for cooling are still being created by California-based engineering firm Brown and Caldwell, Snead said. The firm is designing a facility to remove chemicals put in the water by food processors.

“Brown and Caldwell are real close to designing the facility. They aren’t quite there yet, but they’re real close to starting the design,” Snead said.