The good stuff: Water is South Carolina's most precious and strained resource

Page 2 of 2 He speaks to the success DHEC has had with groundwater permitting in the coastal plain: “We have a capacity use program that says if you are putting in a well that takes out over 3 million gallons, you need a permit. It helps use groundwater supply in the most reasonable way,” he said, although he added that having no such regulation for the state’s surface water is a problem. “Last year, Sen. (Robert W.) Hayes introduced S.428 to establish a permitting program and it did not pass,” Baize said. He asked rhetorically, “If we put this in place, does it hurt business or recruitment? Perhaps if you are new industry, you can take comfort in a regulatory process to allocate resources and not damage supply,” he said. Kara Borie, spokeswoman for the Department of Commerce, denies the drought has had any effect on the department’s economic development efforts. “Water is not a factor in recruiting industrial businesses,” she said. “We have plenty of available water resources, and that is why Google and Jafza came.” Baize said he can’t say whether a seemingly abundant supply coupled with a lack of permitting was a driver for such major users as Google and Jafza to come to South Carolina. Google’s new data center in Berkeley County and the 1,300-acre logistics park Jafza has planned for Orangeburg County are each in close proximity to large bodies of surface water, which, according to Dean Moss, general manager of the Beaufort Jasper Water and Sewer Authority, have been less affected by the drought than those in the Upstate. To accommodate Jafza’s future operations, Santee Cooper, South Carolina’s state-owned electric and water utility, constructed the Lake Marion Regional Water System to the tune of $35 million. It includes a treatment plant that handles 8 million gallons per day and a 1 million-gallon elevated storage tank in Orangeburg County off Interstate 95. As part of Phase I of its construction, a one-mile pipeline began providing initial service to Santee on May 1, according to a statement issued by the utility. Google, too, will be a definite draw on the water supply in Berkeley County, as it uses water-cooling systems to cool its servers. But Berkeley County Water and Sanitation officials have yet to say exactly how much water they will need. Google officials won’t exactly say how much water the company plans to use, either. A statement from Google says, “Your community has all the qualities Google looks for when developing a data center to serve millions of Internet users. We’re confident this $600 million investment will be good for Berkeley County, Google and our Internet users.” Instead, Eitan Bencuya, a Google spokesman, insists, “We have built our data centers to our own specifications and have designed them so that they are now 50 percent more energy-efficient than the industry standard.” He added, “At many of our data centers, including the Berkeley County site, we use water-cooling systems which have a minimal impact on the environment, both in terms of energy used and emissions. The system we use is an evaporative cooling system that significantly cuts the amount of electrical energy we need.” So, although actual usage remains a mystery, Brad Wyche goes back to the holistic view. Wyche, the executive director of Upstate Forever, points out that Badr’s water plan is four years old, and, “like so many plans, we don’t do anything with them once we put them in writing.” Wyche believes that strong sentiments about private property rights have carried over to water usage, even if it is a public resource. Still, he said, “I am confident that hopefully soon we will have a law for this, as more people realize there is a proper role for government control, as it puts a strain on all our natural resources.” In the meantime, Badr advises, “We need to operate in conservation at all times, using only what we need, so we can add more users.” Wyche maintains that the best way to work with companies is to employ what he calls the “aqueous solutions” of reuse and efficiency. “Businesses can save tremendous amounts of money by being efficient in their use of water. A lot of it has to do with educating them about the advances in technology, getting them to consider different ways of (using water), even if they don’t care much about the environment and they are just concerned with the bottom line.” Beaufort Jasper Water and Sewer Authority’s Moss emphasizes that necessity often is the mother of invention, whether it is creating legislation to ensure that parking lots incorporate rain gardens as conservation methods or that major users of water file for permits. “Education is important, technology is important and price is important,” he said. In the end, Moss believes it comes down to how much we value the water and how much customers would be willing to pay for it. Badr urges everyone to think outside the box, even though the plan is not implemented. “There are lots of ways to reduce impact of drought: reuse gray water, capture water from roofs, etc. We are not there yet, but we cannot continue to do the things we used to do 100 years ago.” << Start < Prev 1 2 Next > End >>