waterbycounty

Data centers and water

Data Center Water Use in Kanawha County, WV

Kanawha County, West Virginia has 1 mapped data center facility, including Alpha Innovations.

Alpha Innovations

Water pressure for new demandHow hard a large new water user, like a data center, would press on this county's water. It blends recent drinking-water compliance, drought, and existing industrial demand. Higher pressure means new demand competes harder with current uses. It is not a judgment about whether one should be built.

10/ 100

Low water pressure

Kanawha County has no health violations in the last 5 years, no drought stress, high existing industrial water demand baseline.

Mapped facilities
1
EPA + OpenStreetMap layers
Estimated power load
Not mapped
No capacity estimate
Permitted discharge
Not reported
Clean Water Act permit fields
DCWSI national rank
#1,041
of 318 scored counties

The operators

How many data centers are in Kanawha County?

1 facility is mapped to Kanawha County, West Virginia across the EPA and OpenStreetMap layers, run by operators including Alpha Innovations. Counts reflect mapped footprint, not an operator's total fleet.

  • Alpha Federal

    Alpha Innovations · South Charleston, WV

    OpenStreetMap

Supply versus demand

How much water do Kanawha County data centers use?

Exact facility water draw is rarely public. As a screening proxy we compare the Clean Water Act permitted discharge mapped to these facilities against the county's entire industrial water baseline from the USGS 2020 series.

No Clean Water Act permitted discharge is reported for the mapped facilities in Kanawha County. The figures below show the county's industrial water baseline for context.

Facility discharge vs county industrial water
Mapped facility discharge
Not reported
County industrial baseline
124 Mgal/day

Model a build

Can Kanawha County support more data centers?

On the water-pressure scale, Kanawha County sits at 10, below the national median, so new large-load demand has more slack here than in most counties. Size a hypothetical build to see the daily draw against the county industrial baseline.

Data Center Water Budget Calculator

Estimate daily water use for a hypothetical facility in Kanawha County.

1 MW1,000 MW
40%100%
799K gallons/dayLow Impact

Your facility would use 0.6% of this county's existing industrial water baseline — well within sustainable range.

0.6% of county industrial baseline122.78 Mgal/day remaining headroom

Based on USGS 2020 water-use data and EPA-standard cooling intensity constants. Not a substitute for site-specific water rights analysis.

In context

How does Kanawha County compare nationally?

DCWSI build-out rank
#1,041
of 318 counties with a stress score
Water pressure vs median
-9
national median is 19 of 100
Share of mapped load
N/A
of 166.02 GW mapped nationally

Kanawha County is one of 330 US counties with mapped data centers. See the full ranking and the interactive map in the national atlas.

Facility data combines EPA ECHO, EPA Clean Water Act permits, OpenStreetMap, and the IM3 Open Source Data Center Atlas (DOE/PNNL), geocoded to county FIPS. Capacity and water baselines come from IM3 and USGS 2020 water-use data. These are county-level screening figures, not a facility-level water-use audit. Read the full methodology.

By Evan Brooks, Data EditorPublished Reviewed by Evan Brooks, Data Editor