Texas law requires the state to update its water plan every five years. According to Texas Scorecard, the Texas Water Development Board recently approved the plan for 2027, with projects on drought preparedness and management.
However, critics say the 2027 State Water Plan currently leaves out analysis of water usage by data centers. The Texas Tribune says that there are at least 248 planned data center projects in the state and 335 in operation.
Larry French, senior fellow for water policy at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, says that the state water plan is a combination of regional water plans.
"Those plans basically consist of an evaluation of what current water supplies are in a region, what the current demands are for water in the region and what the projected growth or change in demand will be occurring over 50-year planning period," French explains.
The plan recognizes the “growing interest in water demand from data centers and artificial intelligence facilities” and the limited information about this that hindered any adjustments.
As of now, only Phase I of the water plan was adopted, and Phase II will be adopted later in the year, including “additional analysis and value-added content consistent with prior state water plans.”
There isn't a lot of information now, French says, on water use by such centers, to help inform on the scope of the issue, and more analysis needs to be done.
"During the last legislative session, the legislature directed and funded the Public Utilities Commission to cooperate with the Water Development Board in gathering water-use information on these data centers,” French says. “And so, they've queried a variety of data centers. There was a hearing last month, the response, voluntary response from data center operators, was fairly disappointing."
French also mentions that the impacts are local regarding data center water usage.
