American Water: data‑center hookups are early talks; developers must fund needed upgrades

Pennsylvania American Water representatives told Scranton council during a caucus meeting that talks with prospective data centers drawing from Lake Scranton are at an early stage and that the utility will not commit system capacity unless modeling shows it will not harm existing customers.

"Our stance is do no harm to existing customers," said a company operations director. He added that "any improvements to the infrastructure that would be needed to supply these data centers will be at the cost of those developers," and that service requests are reviewed for source availability, treatment capacity and distribution capacity before commitments are made.

The company said peak, short‑duration cooling demands often cited in public discussions reflect rare, high‑use periods rather than steady annual consumption. Company staff said most days — particularly in winter — would show little additional water use compared with a typical office building.

Council members pressed the utility on guardrails in severe drought or long‑term shortages and asked whether the public and municipal officials would have a role in negotiations. The company said it intends to keep communities informed and, in the words of a representative, "that's our intention" to include community engagement similar to the session held that night.

Pennsylvania American Water offered to require developers to pay for any new tanks, pumps or treatment upgrades and said such upgrades would be permitted and engineered before the utility would commit supply. The company cited a recent project outside the immediate region as an example of developer‑funded service provisioning but said no firm contracts or allocations for Scranton‑area data centers had been finalized.

Next steps: the company invited council to continue discussions and said it would remain open to public engagement while engineering and permitting work is done prior to any service commitments.