Carvins Cove sat 14.6 feet below full pond in early July. That is 65.9 percent of capacity. The Virginia Drought Monitor has the Roanoke Valley in D2 severe drought. On July 9 the Western Virginia Water Authority moved every customer to Stage 1 voluntary conservation, the first time in 22 years of service it has run its drought contingency plan. Two weeks later Google told Botetourt County that the first of three data centers at the Botetourt Center at Greenfield will use air cooling, according to WDBJ7's July 23 coverage. The authority says that building no longer needs the 2 million gallons per day it was expected to draw. Google tied the decision to business demand and infrastructure requirements. Buildings two and three stay under evaluation.
The contract underneath this is public only because a court forced it open. In 2024 Google asked for 10 and 11 million gallons per day. The authority refused and capped the full three-building campus at 8 million gallons per day. Two million is available on day one. The remaining 6 million depends on the authority's ability to serve everyone else drawing on Carvins Cove. Executive director Michael McEvoy has put the expected annual average at 1.2 million gallons per day. The utility services funding agreement was signed in October 2025. A companion infrastructure agreement commits the authority to deliver 2 million gallons per day of capacity on or about January 1, 2028. Residents did not see unredacted figures until late February 2026, after Circuit Court Judge Leisa Ciaffone ruled the water numbers were not proprietary and the Virginia Court of Appeals declined to block the release. Google bought the 312-acre site for roughly $14 million in June 2025. The three buildings run about 921,000 square feet against a stated investment of at least $3 billion.
Air-cooled heat rejection works against dry-bulb temperature. Evaporative systems work against wet bulb. Across a Virginia July that spread is worth real compressor lift. Lift is condensing pressure. Condensing pressure is kW per ton. kW per ton is the line item that replaces the gallons. Eric Sjostedt studies how data centers land on water and wastewater utilities as a presidential postdoctoral fellow at Virginia Tech. He said "there is a trade-off in that you have to use more electricity," then pointed past the meter to the fuel burned upstream to make it. He cautioned that the answer turns on site specifics, since no single rule covers every data center. This is the water-power tradeoff operators keep getting wrong, and Botetourt is now a live test of it. The architecture holds up in production, where Amazon built a 0.12 L/kWh WUE on roughly 90% air cooling. Nobody has published what it costs on the electric side here.
Julie Bivins co-founded the Southwest Virginia Data Center Transparency Alliance. She read the paperwork. The performance agreement was not amended. Nothing was rescinded. Google remains free to request up to 8 million gallons per day at full buildout, which is what the document says. The authority confirms that no updated consumption figures exist and that the prior agreement stands. It has clarified that the 8 million gallon figure circulating in April 2026 emails described the capacity of a future pipeline, sized that way to avoid tearing up the same roads twice. Gary Larrowe, the county administrator, called the news a positive update and said the schedule holds. Both statements are accurate, and the ceiling sits untouched behind them. Audrey Ward of the Environmental Accountability and Strategy Team called the announcement a public relations move that fixes no duration, no scope, and no cooling system for the other two buildings.
Kathryn Hatam of the Transparency Alliance tied the added electrical load to substations, voltage, fan noise running around the clock, and rejected heat pushed over neighboring property. Operators who have commissioned large air-cooled plants know how that part goes. Air-cooled plants running near 80 decibels become their own permitting fight.
Appalachian Power is already rebuilding for this campus. Its Daleville Area Transmission Improvements Project upgrades or rebuilds 17 miles of 138 kV line, adds a tenth of a mile of new line, upgrades the Botetourt, Cloverdale, Mount Union and Trinity substations, and builds one more. The application goes to the State Corporation Commission in fall 2027, with construction finishing in late 2029. Google spokesperson Leslie Schuman said the company pays for all the power its data centers use and for new infrastructure costs. Asked how many megawatts the campus will pull, the utility cited a nondisclosure agreement. Google holds a power purchase agreement for the full 79.3 megawatt output of Rocky Forge Wind, Virginia's first utility-scale wind farm. Cardinal News reported that 79.3 megawatts does not cover the site. Every fan and compressor kilowatt on a design-day afternoon clears through Appalachian Power at whatever the marginal generator happens to be that hour. That load figure decides whether buildings two and three go dry or go back to the reservoir. It stays sealed until fall 2027.