UPDATE 6/11/2026: Avista confirmed their new customer would be a data center, but could not confirm who it is or where the planned project is.
Spokane City Council announced an emergency ordinance creating a one year moratorium on data center construction, being introduced at their June 15, 2026 meeting. Community members are encouraged to attend, voice their opinions about data centers, and let representatives know why this moratorium is important to them.
Spokane Riverkeeper and the Spokane Environmental Policy Coalition support this proactive approach, which provides time to better understand the implications of large-scale data center development and develop appropriate safeguards before projects move forward. We will continue to follow this process and provide updates as they become available.
Community members are also encouraged to reach out to Spokane County Commissioners to ask for a moratorium at a county level as well. Our friends at 350 Spokane created an action form to make it easy to send a note! Use the link below to, and be sure to customize your comments with your personal notes too!
Last week, Avista announced that it is working with a new large-load customer expected to require an initial electric demand of 125 megawatts, with projected demand increasing to 500 megawatts by 2032. According to Avista, the customer could ultimately consume more than half of the electricity currently used by all residential and business customers in Spokane County. While the customer has not been publicly identified, projects of this magnitude are commonly associated with large-scale computing infrastructure, including data centers and artificial intelligence operations.
For Spokane Riverkeeper, this announcement raises a central question about how this level of industrial demand would interact with the Spokane River system and the Spokane Valley–Rathdrum Prairie Aquifer, which together form the foundation of the region’s water and energy systems.
Scale of Energy Demand in Context
This level of electricity demand is significant when placed in the context of Spokane’s existing energy infrastructure. Avista’s Spokane River hydropower system, including Post Falls, Upper Falls, Monroe Street, Nine Mile, and Long Lake dams,has a combined generating capacity of approximately 137 megawatts. The City of Spokane’s Upriver Dam adds additional generation and produced nearly 60 million kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2025. By comparison, the proposed single customer could require several times the combined generating capacity of the Spokane River hydropower system, representing a level of demand that exceeds anything currently operating in the region at a single-facility scale.
Spokane does currently host data infrastructure, but it is largely composed of smaller-scale facilities such as telecommunications nodes, enterprise servers, and distributed commercial data storage supporting routine digital services. These facilities are generally intermittent or modest in load and are not comparable to large continuous-load computing campuses.
While the specific customer has not been disclosed, the scale and characteristics of the load are consistent with large computing facilities that operate continuously and require high, stable power inputs. Even the City of Spokane, Avista’s largest Washington customer, uses far less electricity annually than what is being discussed for this single new load.
Water Use and the Spokane Aquifer System
Large data centers also have significant water demands, primarily through cooling systems designed to prevent servers from overheating. Depending on design and operating conditions, these systems can consume substantial volumes of water, much of which is lost to evaporation and does not return to the watershed. Research has found that a single 100-megawatt data center can use approximately 100 million gallons of water annually, a scale comparable to the total annual water use of a thousand households (Columbia Riverkeeper, 2026).
To understand what this means locally, it is useful to compare this scale to Spokane’s largest existing water users. Based on City of Spokane utility data, major commercial water users like hospitals, universities, and industrial campuses typically fall in the range of roughly 50 to 90 million gallons of annual water use. A single large data center operating at high capacity could easily use nearly three times as much water as Spokane's five largest reported commercial and institutional water users combined.
The Spokane River and the Spokane Valley–Rathdrum Prairie Aquifer function as a single interconnected hydrologic system. The aquifer is the region’s sole drinking water source and also plays a critical role in sustaining summer river flows during low-water periods. Increases in consumptive water demand at large industrial scale raise important questions about long-term availability in a basin already experiencing warming temperatures, declining snowpack, and seasonal low-flow conditions.
Water Quality and Ecological Impacts
Water impacts from data centers are not limited to total water use. Cooling systems can also affect water temperature, chemical composition, and wastewater quality, with direct consequences for rivers and downstream ecosystems. Multiple studies and agency reports identify that data center cooling systems can discharge heated water and chemically treated wastewater, requiring permits to manage temperature standards and pollutant loading in receiving waters (Washington Department of Revenue Data Center Workgroup, 2025). There are additional risks from industrial compounds such as PFAS and heavy metals, associated with cooling processes and infrastructure and are difficult to fully remove through conventional treatment systems (Columbia Riverkeeper, 2026).
The Spokane River is already under significant ecological stress, particularly during summer months when low flows and elevated temperatures combine to limit habitat availability for native cold water aquatic species. The river is listed as impaired for temperature under the Clean Water Act, and thermal stress remains one of the primary challenges for native fish populations. Cold-water species such as redband trout depend on cool, connected habitat, yet portions of the river regularly have low flows and exceed temperatures considered protective of aquatic life during the warmest months of the year.
These temperature conditions are also closely linked to hydrology. Because the Spokane River and Spokane Valley–Rathdrum Prairie Aquifer are hydraulically connected, groundwater levels directly influence summer base flows in the river. When aquifer levels decline or groundwater withdrawals increase, river flows can decrease, which in turn contributes to higher water temperatures, reduced dissolved oxygen, and diminished habitat complexity. These conditions create compounding stress for aquatic species already living near thermal tolerance thresholds.
The Information Gap on Industrial Water and Energy Use
A central challenge in evaluating data center development and impacts in Spokane is the lack of consistent, publicly available data on facility-level water and energy consumption. While utilities track overall system demand, there is no general requirement for individual large-load customers to disclose detailed usage data. As a result, cumulative impacts to shared resources such as the Spokane River and aquifer are difficult to fully understand and appreciate in advance of development decisions.
During the most recent Washington State legislative session, Spokane Riverkeeper and partners supported legislation that would have required greater transparency from new large-load facilities, including basic disclosure of water and energy use. That bill did not pass. In the absence of such requirements, decisions about large-scale industrial development are made through existing water law and local permitting and utility processes. And these systems not designed to evaluate modern high-demand computing infrastructure or its combined impacts on interconnected groundwater and surface water systems.
At the same time, proposals for increasingly large facilities are advancing quickly, and long-term infrastructure decisions are being made before adequate information is available to fully assess their impacts.
A River Worth Protecting
The Spokane River provides habitat for fish and wildlife, supports recreation, sustains Tribal cultural resources, and is inseparable from the aquifer that supplies drinking water throughout the region. It is already facing stress from warming temperatures, declining summer flows, pollution, and a long legacy of industrial development. Adding new large-scale demands on water and energy resources without a clear understanding of their combined impacts risks undermining decades of restoration and protection efforts.
As Spokane evaluates future data center development, decisions should be guided by transparent science, comprehensive analysis of water and energy use, and a full understanding of potential impacts to the watershed.
References
Columbia Riverkeeper. (2026, February). A closer look: Columbia River data centers. https://www.columbiariverkeeper.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/2026.02.26-Data-Center-Closer-Look-Report.pdf
Florida Water & Pollution Control Operators Association. (2026). Water use and cooling systems in data center operations.
Kahle, S. C., Caldwell, R. R., & Bartolino, J. R. (2005). Compilation of geologic, hydrologic, and ground-water flow modeling information for the Spokane Valley-Rathdrum Prairie aquifer, Spokane County, Washington, and Bonner and Kootenai Counties, Idaho (U.S. Geological Survey Scientific Investigations Report 2005-5227). https://doi.org/10.3133/sir20055227
Spokane Valley-Rathdrum Prairie Aquifer Atlas. (2015). SVRP Aquifer Atlas (2015 edition). http://www.svrapaquiferatlas.org
Washington Department of Revenue Data Center Workgroup. (2025). 2025 preliminary report. Washington State Department of Revenue. https://dor.wa.gov/sites/default/files/2025-12/2025DataCntrWrkgrpPrelimReport.pdf
Yakama Nation. (2025, November 10). Data center findings and recommendations to the Washington Governor and Legislature: A report based on participation on the Washington Data Center Workgroup. https://yakamafish-nsn.gov/sites/default/files/Yakama%20Nation%20Data%20Center%20Findings%20and%20Recommendations%20Nov%2010%202025%20only.pdf