A Meta Contractor Contaminated Cheyenne's Recycled Water This Summer. The City's Utility Just Signed Google Up for 22 More Years of Data Centers.

In June, Cheyenne's water utility found a bacterium called Cupriavidus gilardii growing in the recycled water the city uses to irrigate its parks and sports fields. It's an organism that can make people sick. Crews shut the irrigation system down, drained it, disinfected it, and switched to drinking water for the parks while they traced the source. Then they didn't tell anyone for weeks. Residents didn't learn about the contamination until the end of June, and didn't learn where it came from until July: a contractor working for one of Meta's data centers in town. Wyoming Congresswoman Harriet Hageman sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg demanding answers. City officials said the bacteria never reached anyone's tap water. That it took a month to say so, in a city that's building the digital infrastructure for half the industry's largest companies, is its own kind of answer.

A city that already voted on this

The contamination scare landed in a town already arguing about data centers from every angle. Cheyenne has Meta and Microsoft facilities running or under construction, with local estimates putting the pipeline at anywhere from 40 to 70 more. On May 26th, the city council voted down a 12-month moratorium proposed by Councilman Mark Moody by a lopsided margin — Cowboy State Daily reported it 9-1, Wyoming Public Media and WyoFile reported it 8-1, and neither outlet has corrected the other, which tells you something about how fast this story is moving even for the people covering it full-time. Either way, one vote carried it. Mayor Patrick Collins had already made his position public before the vote: "an outright moratorium or a ban, that's not our way." His own numbers framed the water math: all the data centers already planned would use roughly 400 acre-feet of water a year, about 3 percent of the city's current usage and 1.8 percent of the 22,000 acre-feet it has available annually. Union construction workers turned out to defend the industry. Farmers downstream on Crow Creek, some of whom have already converted flood irrigation to overhead pivots to conserve what they have, weren't as convinced. The council sided with the mayor and the unions. The moratorium died in May. The bacteria showed up in June.

The deal that landed in October

On October 6th, Black Hills Corp announced the agreements that let it serve Google's next data center in Cheyenne — a Large Power Contract Services Agreement and a Generation Facilities Agreement, both effective September 30th and running through 2048. The company plans to spend $1.8 billion between 2027 and 2029 building 564 megawatts of new generation at its Cheyenne Prairie Generating Station, owned through a non-regulated affiliate. On top of that, Black Hills will manage roughly 2.1 gigawatts of third-party Wyoming power through a privately run microgrid, bringing the total resource stack behind this one customer to about 2.7 gigawatts. Deliveries start in late 2027 and ramp to peak load around 2030.

We are pleased to support Google's planned investment in Wyoming while remaining firmly committed to providing safe, reliable, and cost-effective service to every customer. The agreements demonstrate how innovative energy solutions can support economic growth while ensuring existing customers are protected.Linn Evans, President and CEO, Black Hills Corp

Evans was specific about what "protected" means here: the contracts and the regulatory mechanisms underneath them are structured so Google bears the full cost of serving the data center for the life of the project. That's a 22-year commitment, not a press-release promise, and it's the same instinct regulators in Michigan acted on this month when they made DTE Energy document Google's financial commitment inside the contract itself rather than take a developer's word for it. Black Hills and DTE reached for different tools — a dedicated, company-owned power plant versus a minimum-billing tariff — but they're solving the same problem: making sure a 50-year-old rate base doesn't end up subsidizing a hyperscaler's electric bill. Black Hills expects the arrangement to generate about $150 million in net income by 2030 and $2.4 billion in unlevered free cash flow through 2048, net of the $1.8 billion it's spending to build the plant. Those are the company's own projections, not an independent regulator's finding, which puts them a rung below the Michigan order on our evidence ladder — real money, on a real signed contract, but not yet tested by an outside auditor the way a rate case would test it.

What the contract protects, and what it doesn't

I think the honest way to read this is that Cheyenne and Black Hills just solved a problem nobody in town was actually arguing about. The May moratorium fight wasn't over who pays Google's power bill — Black Hills already had a separate tariff structure in place to keep data centers off the average ratepayer's back, and nobody on either side of that vote disputed it. The fight was over water, noise, light pollution, and how fast a town of under 70,000 people can absorb dozens of hyperscale campuses without losing track of what any one of them is actually doing to the ground underneath it. A 22-year generation contract with Google's name on the cost column answers the question Mayor Collins didn't get asked in May. It doesn't answer the one he did: his own line, from before the vote, was that water is "our biggest conversation." Cheyenne just spent the summer finding out what happens when nobody has that conversation fast enough.