HERMISTON — Sometimes switching to a bigger electric cable is not an option.

That might be the situation in Hermiston, which already has an enormous draw on the city’s electrical grid to satisfy the needs of the local computer data center.

It sips up lots of watts.

”We have a lot of hyperscale data centers located here in our region,” said Hermiston Assistant City Manager Mark Morgan, “so we’re intensely dealing with one company. They are experts in their field and we work collaboratively with them. We understand what their forecasts are for future data center demand.”

The company is Amazon and that anticipated demand is most likely very much. That conclusion has prompted Hermiston into diversifying along established lines.

Right now those lines provide electricity for football fields full of computer servers and water to cool the equipment below the “Ouch, I’m burning up” level.

Morgan was with local officials the week of April 15 to attend the Data Center World’s trade show and conference in Washington, D.C., where the group split its time attending seminars and lectures and manning a Umatilla County exhibit booth. Morgan said it was a boon to attend sessions and hear forecasts and projections for long-term data center growth.

”By far, the main takeaway from most of the sessions is the availability of power for data centers,” he said.

Morgan also said a community needs skilled labor to support data center development.

”Our intention with attending the trade show aspect was not necessarily to attract additional data centers,” he said. “It was much more focused on meeting with and identifying those suppliers, vendors, manufacturers that do a lot of stuff in the supply chain that support data center operations all the way from construction equipment to manufacturers of the parts and components that go into data centers.”

Morgan said the hyperscale processing cluster in the Umatilla County region is significant in the data center industry across the country.

”Part of the thought process was trying to reach directly to some of those suppliers and vendors to say, ‘Umatilla County is a great place to put up additional locations for manufacturing some things and storing and distributing and wholesaling some of these components to that broader data center industry,’” he said.

Morgan said he feels the county is in a position where it can meet the needs of the existing data center deployments in the pipeline.

”We’re not saying we would turn away additional data centers,” he said, “but a lot of those decisions hinge on the availability of the power supply.”

Morgan said the conference messaged the availability of power production across the country is what drives the site selection consideration for additional data centers.

”One of the other big takeaways was that in the United States, power consumption has more or less plateaued over the past 20 years,” Morgan said, “but over the past five years or so we’ve seen significant increases in our demand for computing.”

Morgan said the transportation sector is putting increasing pressure on power demand for electric vehicles and other uses.

He also said the Umatilla County team was “pleasantly surprised” with the feedback and potential opportunities that came from attendees visiting the county’s exhibit booth.

”We talked with a lot of folks,” Morgan said. “We have a few calls to follow up on with some companies in the following weeks. We’ll see what those lead to, but overall, I think it was good.”