The new order comes amid several reported cyberattacks on U.S. water systems, which officials suspect have links to Iran, according to The New York Times.

I know the article isn’t saying it’s the same, but I wanted to add a clarification that the FBI had said the attacks were only noted in Rockwell Automation/Allen-Bradley Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), specifically MicroLogix 1100 and 1400 series.

After remotely accessing internet-facing devices, the actors changed the IP addresses and passwords, resulting in a loss of monitoring and control functionality.

There have been PLC attacks that resulted from a compromised device being installed but these appear to be about poor security practices.

Someone is in TROUBLE:

At least one organization reported modified PLC project files after noticing ladder logic discrepancies across several sites.

There is literally a physical key you have to turn to change the program. For example:

Sure you could take a sentence in a reply explaining a very specific scenario and apply it to every situation, but that would be foolish and a waste of time.

Oh no I’m serious replying to a meme

Obviously this happens a lot but people get big mad at unions because they think this is happening and it isn’t necessarily.

The job may be posted internally and externally at the same time. All internal candidates who apply must be assessed first and replied to in order of what union they belong to depending on the job. If can take a long time because people kind of just apply to everything the same way you do as an external candidate.

Once they are all excluded then HR releases the external applicants for review. At no point are they compared with each other. Not all qualified candidates are contacted because there are probably dozens of them, so maybe the top 5 or so will be invited for the evaluation.

It’s shitty that there are people who don’t have work, but I get grumpy when people yell NEPOTISM and other things. If we wanted to hire an internal candidate unethically we could and it wouldn’t get posted externally. If we knew there were wrong internal candidates and we were doing things by the book we would post internal only. No one wants to deal with HR to get things posted externally, I promise.

Electricity was stupid expensive in the 90s in Ontario so it made sense to invest in cogeneration engines to burn digester gas or even natural gas and use the electricity on site. Then electricity got cheaper so it still made sense to burn biogas generated on site to lower your peak demands especially if you were paying time of use or you were Class A and needed to do load shedding. Sometimes you’d even get a discount from the electricity company for running your systems because it meant they could delay increasing the grid.

Now, the financial incentive is for carbon credits. You don’t get those if you burn on site, you just get to buy less taxed fuels. If you instead upgrade the gas to renewable natural gas (like what is described in the article) and put that in the natural gas grid, you can sell the carbon credits to companies who are required to offset their own generation. I think that is where the money is in these schemes.

(That and the tipping costs for food waste, free slowly digesting material to regulate the digesters in the form of the manure, outsourcing the annoying regulatory bits to the farmers, and building goodwill for green data centres)

I promise this isn’t just a well askually but anaerobic digestion (what is being discussed in the article) and composting are different.

Composting requires oxygen. It produces carbon dioxide. It produces heat. Compost has less restrictions for use as a fertilizer than digested mature. I’m not from the US so I don’t want to assume it’s the same across all states but in Canada you can sell it to the public.

Anaerobic Digesters do not require oxygen. It produces carbon dioxide and methane. It requires heat input to occur at a reasonable rate. Use as a fertilizer is restricted because more pathogens survive. Hydrogen sulphide is produced so sometimes ferric chloride is added, and that reduces the amount of phosphorus available to plants.

One of the trade offs with digestion is that processing the digestate into something usable takes additional energy. If it’s a single farm and they are not taking additional feedstock it’s no more nutrients that they had before they started digesting. Chances are they can manage the nutrients on site and don’t need to input energy.

If they are taking stuff from off-site, or if they expended their operation beyond what they can manage on site then they need to choose if they are going to transport it off-site as a liquid, thicken it into cake (mmmmm), or create a fertilizer product like pellets. Each option requires more energy than the last. They may be able to sell the pellets but typically have to give liquid or cake away for free or pay people to take it.

The operation, run by Pennsylvania-based Ag-Grid Energy, is the first of its kind in the country. The company claims the anaerobic digestion of manure and food waste could be a game-changer, not only in powering crypto, but data centers, which currently use 4.9% of the country’s electricity, a figure that could double by 2030.

There are a handful of net energy producing waste treatment processes in the world, and they all achieve it by taking advantage of hyper local opportunities to optimize. They are not infinitely scalable. For example, T. PARK in China takes sludge from several wastewater plants and uses the energy to power one of them.

Further, it is not truly net positive if it leaves residuals that need further treatment.

The project claims to recycle more than 45,000 gallons of food waste per day and the manure of 4,000 cows. “What we want to do is also provide, if possible through fiber optics, [the] value of the AI computing capacity to that same regional area,” Akki says.

The energy isn’t in the manure. Wastewater plants use food waste (co-digestion) to boost methane production of digesters. Some places get the food waste from a municipal green bin program but that’s a giant pain and wastewater plants tend to prefer food waste from food manufacturing. So it’s unclear if this is diverting the food waste from landfill. The best solution would be to reduce the food waste in the first place. Can you call it green if it is the result of over production?

Don’t get me wrong, I am pro-biogas. In municipal wastewater treatment the best results for biogas production come when you direct as much short chain carbon to the digester, which greatly reduces one of the highest electrical loads on the plant (blowers to oxidize carbon).

You’re still burning it though. It looks good on paper because the CO2 emissions don’t count in Canadian GHG reporting because the source is biogenic. Doesn’t change the fact that there are emissions.

The digested waste, or digestate, is meant to be recycled, potentially into a range of products, such as fertilizer and animal bedding.

The energy to turn digestate into a fertilize product is pretty massive. Many of the plants that are energy neutral incinerate and the ash is landfilled.

Digested manure can be more polluting than manure that hasn’t been digested, according to USDA research.

Eeeehhhhh… Technically true but only because people are allowed to operate digesters poorly. I was talking to an engineer in the states who told me his digester was losing 30% of the methane by leaks and I was sitting getting second hand panic but apparently that’s not super illegal? We would have problems with the environmental regulators and the TSSA.

The project intended to send about 41,000 gallons of waste per day into a tributary of Walla Walla Creek, which empties into Lake Michigan.

Excuse me what

There are some high level engineering plans available.

Some highlights:

• daily food waste estimated to be 225 tonnes and it may require on site processing.
• less than half of the digester feed will be manure.
• Digesters are mesophilic meaning they need to be heated to and maintained at ~35 C
• heat for the digester is provided by burning fuel oil 🙃 (most municipal plants burn the biogas)
• gas upgrading is by chilling, filtering and compressing for transport via pipeline. No mention of energy demands.
• the project would add runoff capture for manure storage which didn’t exist before.
• the manure needs to be pretreated before digestion to remove sand
• the project agreement means Vanguard is not responsible for the waste products after the gas is removed.
• the project will create waste with more nutrients than the farm can land apply on their site. (You know, due to the additional food waste). There are therefore no details about what the plan is for the digestate.
• based on a news article it sounded like they wanted to build a pipeline to transport it to other farms for land application. That might be where the waste to the creek idea came from? The pipeline was to go under the creek. Maybe that was just if it broke?
• the enclosed engineering drawings are civil/structural only, no indication of power demand or fuel consumption.

There is also an air pollution permit application available. Additional details about the project include

• two 750 kw emergency generators (diesel powered)
• two natural gas boilers at 4 MMBTU/hr (unclear if this is instead of the fuel oil in the other doc?)
• the pressure relief system was to have a flare, which is positive. It is better to flare gas in an energy versus just venting.

The nutrient management permit application is behind a log in so I can’t see it but this article has statements from Vanguard that contradict the engineering plans.

Hanselman says the company never uses human waste in its digesters, which is how PFAS would enter the equation and that the sources of the other organic food waste would likely be byproducts from dairy processing and beer brewing.

The application included provisions for accepting packaged food. The packaging is where the pfas is.

The process Vanguard’s co-digesters use to clean the digestate on the back end, Hanselman says, allows for nutrients to be removed and taken away. That allows the farm to limit the amount of phosphorus and nitrogen that is spread on the farm’s land. He noted that at the company’s first project in Vermont, they’re removing 12 tons of phosphorus per day from the environment.

This is explicitly untrue for the Waupaca project? Vanguard has no part in digestate treatment. Sometimes there is phosphorus removal during H2S removal (if FeCl is used) but this project used a scrubber. So no nutrient reduction.

I obviously can’t speak for every project, but this example project would increase the amount of nutrients the farm has to manage (because of the trucked in food waste). It would increase energy consumption, and there was no plan for what to do with the digestate. It’s not even clear if there is a net methane release reduction over their previous methods because the carbon in the food is more likely to convert to methane in the digester. The more slow to break down carbon from the manure may still end up on fields.

Food waste digestion needs a less biodegradable feed stock to make the process more stable. In municipal wastewater you balance raw sludge (easily digestible) and secondary sludge (less easily digestible) to ensure the acetogenisis step doesn’t poison the methanogens step.

I don’t see a benefit to the local community in this proposal at all. If they treated the wastewater using energy efficient methods then maybe? But not this project as it was proposed. Vanguard gets the slowly biodegradable material, land to use, to be absolved of responsibility to deal with byproducts. Seems like a bad deal.

I don’t think we are going to see eye to eye on this. We are reading the quotes differently. I’ll try one more time.

All from this article: https://thecitizen.com/2026/05/14/the-qts-water-story-is-real-its-just-not-about-qts/

And referencing this letter: https://protectpwc.org/2026/05/05/13786/

There are actually three meters:

• 8" domestic, not given a meter number, on Tyrone road.
• 10" fireline (23006232), highway 54
• 10" fireline (23006231), Tyrone road

The letter says the 8" domestic was installed without inspection, and that the fireline on highway 54 was not hooked up to the account and the fire line on Tyrone road was using more water than allowed and therefore a higher rate will be charged. That’s 27.5 MG unbilled and 13.2 million at the ‘wrong’ rate.

Rapson, Tigert’s boss and the county’s top appointed official, has now told The Citizen on the record that the central claim in that letter is not accurate. County staff did inspect the meter at installation.

This accounts for the 'illegal hookup". The “central claim” is that there was a meter that was not inspected. This person has indicated that the meter was inspected.

Tigert herself has hedged her own letter publicly. She told E&E News, the Politico-owned outlet that broke the national story, “I may have hit ‘send’ too soon.” She acknowledged in the same piece that her staff may have known about the hookups, but that she had not been able to locate the inspection report.

She did not know about the hook up and inspection. She assumed there was no inspection because she could not locate the report.

I was wrong about the leak audits, I was looking at the wrong line of the reports. I will correct my comments.

I can see how you could read it like that but it has been further clarified:

Rapson, Tigert’s boss and the county’s top appointed official, has now told The Citizen on the record that the central claim in that letter is not accurate. County staff did inspect the meter at installation. Rapson’s exact words were, “It’s not like they put a meter in, threw a camel net over it, and we didn’t know they put the meter in.”

The same quote, without explicitly stating the meter was inspected, could be ambiguous. Further:

“Tigert herself has hedged her own letter publicly. She told E&E News, the Politico-owned outlet that broke the national story, “I may have hit ‘send’ too soon.” She acknowledged in the same piece that her staff may have known about the hookups, but that she had not been able to locate the inspection report.”

The letter was such a mess. You can’t use private fire fighting lines for non fire fighting purposes. It makes no sense the conversation would just be “oh we didn’t bill you”, not “you need to stop.”

The following section was incorrect, I was looking at the wrong line on the audit spreadsheet.

(Begin correction)

The board’s meeting minutes are similarly goofy.

The person who wrote this has no clue what they are talking about. The cost per unit water doubled because half the water production was unbilled. Their “leakage index” was 7.01 in 2024, up from 3.46 in 2023.

(End correction)

YIKES

They haven’t met since March.

Tl;dr: the utility clarified there was no unauthorized connection, and wow they are absurdly understaffed I’m not surprised this is such a mess

It has been clarified that the hookup wasn’t without the knowledge of the utility, it was a failure of a new transmitter/verifying they were getting readings.

https://thecitizen.com/2026/05/11/behind-fayettes-qts-water-controversy-a-missed-meter-8000-workers-and-a-massive-construction-project/

I work in this realm and as soon as I read the quotes from the utility in the first batch of articles it was immediately clear that people who didn’t have all the information were responding to inquiries. Your average utility employee, even in admin functions have zero media training. If I had a penny for every time I had to deal with the fallout of some ambitious comment that was taken out of context by the media or public, I’d have several pennies.

Statewide, between 2010 and 2015, the estimated water use by hog farmers increased 116 percent (from 2.26 to 4.9 MGD). Within the livestock category, the greatest water use could be found in beef (15 MGD) and dairy (9.6 MGD) operations. The water use estimates for goats, sheep, horses, and broiler chickens all declined. The region with the greatest increase in animal water use (by percentage) was in the Altamaha region, and the greatest decline in animal water use was in the Coastal region.

https://www.gawater.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/GWC_Watering_GA_Report.pdf

The three named uses add up to 29.5 MLD, which is 129% the total capacity of the Lafayette water system production capacity. 😬

I might also suggest that a public sector dedicated to balancing the resident water demands and industry water-use demands could improve the rate/volume of consumption. But that would require a public voting base / private executive staff that valued the long-term health of the state rather than the short term economic growth of the local neighborhoods.

I think what most people are missing is that the water consumption was unmetered. Let me put it this way: the water plant knows how much water it’s making at any instant, but there is a huge delay in knowing what the “revenue flow” is. There is always loss in the system between what is produced and what is billed.

I don’t know this specific system, but if they couldn’t detect the pressure loss without customer complaints, it wasn’t some catastrophic increase in demand. As an example, water main breaks with uncontrolled lost flow are detected in the distribution system when pressure cannot be maintained or local pumping stations are running nonstop to maintain pressure. Low pressure is a safety issue so it gets investigated asap, and increased pumping will probably get flagged as suspicious or at least someone will need to explain why the electric bill is so damn high… Utilities have leak detection tools they can use, and this would have been deployed if there was evidence of a sudden huge increase in demand because the symptoms would have been the same as a leak.

What is more likely is that the mismatch between production and billed flows was being audited and the local complaints about water pressure was the clue that helped them identify the culprit.

We can look at water loss reports here: https://epd.georgia.gov/watershed-protection-branch/water-efficiency-and-water-loss-audits

Their 2024 Infrastructure Leakage Index (ILI) was 7.02 with a validity score of 71, with the 2023 and 2022 results being 3.46 (70) and 3.37 (66). I’ll bet that lit a fire under some bodies ass!

Articles on the topic contain statements like:

“We get this notification from Fayette County water system saying you need to stop watering your lawns to help conserve water,” said James Clifton, an attorney and property rights advocate who obtained and shared the 2025 letter to QTS.

“So the first thing they do is lean on the individuals and the citizens to stop water consumption when we have QTS that’s just absolutely draining us — most months it’s the No. 1 consumer of water in the county,” said Clifton, who is also running for a seat on the Fayette County Board of Commissioners.

It really annoys me that this is shared without analysis. The instruction to stop water lawns is entirely unrelated to the data centers water use.

The systems planning documents show the water sources are sufficient for the projected demand in 2070, but the production capacity (treatment plants) needs to be expanded. Even though there were a lot of losses in 2024, the system was still opening in their capacity. Local pressure losses are a reflection of local bottlenecks, not overall system capacity issues.

Further, the water conservation is mandated by the Metro North Georgia Water Planning District and their Water Resource Management Plan which:

requires that Fayette County Water System develop an irrigation pricing schedule that recognizes the impact on peak demand from irrigation.

These restriction have been in place since at least 2007, according to my tired eyes.

Anways, I’m not trying to defend the data centre. I’m just annoyed with all the misinformation about this specific case. The root cause is likely administrative.

While not the case for this specific county, things like non municipal water supply for industries including animal agriculture are a massive risk to water sheds. These water users are subject to far fewer audits and checks, so if they are withdrawing more than permitted they are unlikely to get caught. Water tables drop and municipal supplies are impacted, but again without the means to identify the cause.

Attention on this specific case and all the misinformation about it is a distraction from other massive water users and their impact.

ETA: https://thecitizen.com/2026/05/11/behind-fayettes-qts-water-controversy-a-missed-meter-8000-workers-and-a-massive-construction-project/

Lol, it was a comms failure

Yes…someday…

Fun fact (?): The Thames being so gross is one of the reasons modern sewage treatment took off. One of the main tests is designed based on the behavior of the Thames: https://dnr.wisconsin.gov/topic/labCert/BODAbout.html

You can put the water plant at the end of the sewage plant for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEWater but yeah the water body does some of the treatment too.

Thank you shark fucker 420! You will be pleased to know that I’m not even that unique among the turd herders. Plenty of us are ‘eccentric’.

No and yes.

Most regulations are based on the assimilation capacity of the receiving body which is nerd talk for “how much pollution the water can take before it starts showing signs of harm”. So you treat to that, nature does a bit more, and then the drinking water plant takes water from an ideal place.

Most wastewater plants just speed up nature.

The history of centralized treatment is super fascinating because it centred on what the problems were when it was established (very late 1800-early 1900s) whereas drinking water treatment really has changed more to deal with how our understanding of human health has changed. They don’t really match up!

Sorry, I have wastewater autism: direct potable reuse (turning sewage into drinking water) is super rare and they def don’t do that at NEORSD.

Almost every time I give a tour someone says something like that and I have to explain sewage is treated and put back into the water body, then a different plant takes the water, treats it, and puts it in the water pipes. (Yes that’s just for surface water, but same idea for septic/wells)

The more the merrier.