SAN ANTONIO – With data centers popping up across the state of Texas, including San Antonio, local power and water utilities are preparing.
CPS Energy Vice President of Corporate Development Jonathan Tijerina told KSAT the utility’s current system peaks at about 6,000 megawatts of power usage during the summer. By 2035, he said, they expect to add another 2,000 MW.
Though that number encompasses all different kinds of new customers, “large load” customers drawing more than 40 MW are expected to make up about half. The “majority” of them, he said, would likely be data centers.
“When you’re talking about growing by 30% to 33% over the next decade, and 50% of that’s coming potentially from a large user, like a data center or something equivalent, that is a big change to the planning, the assumptions, the forecasting,” Tijerina said.
Each megawatt is enough to power about 250 homes during a hot day, according to CPS.
Tijerina said the utility has started to discuss at board meetings roughly $1 billion in capital investment over the next decade to account for all the growth — not just from data centers — including the areas of transmission, distribution and generation.
“You know, the (power generation) plan does account for growth and does have excess capacity, right? We do carry a reserve margin, and that reserve margin is what helps us manage that growth so that we don’t have to be just fully responsive and have to make a faster decision, if you will, on the way we manage our investments in infrastructure,” he said.
Depending on their size, data centers can draw large amounts of power.
“The largest inquiry we have seen is in the thousands of megawatts, potentially. Multiple solution on a physical site,” Tijerina said. “On average, I think we’re no different than what you’re seeing on a national trend. And it’s anywhere from that kind of 50 MW to 150 MW kind of range.”
But the centers aren’t just power-hungry. They can be thirsty too, with water used to cool the servers and computers.
An unpublished draft of a white paper by the Houston Advanced Research Center estimates existing data centers in Texas will consume approximately 25 billion gallons of water in 2025. That number, however, accounts for both the direct use of water in cooling the sites and the water used during the electrical generation process.
San Antonio Water System Senior Vice President of Water Resources and Governmental Relations Donovan Burton said SAWS is often able to often get data centers onto their recycled water system.
Existing data centers, he said, are using about 1% of SAWS’ potable water system and “probably 3% to 5%” of the recycled water. At the moment, he said they’re “not a huge drain on the SAWS system.”
“It is something that we need to pay attention to in the future as they increase their water usage,” he said. “That will be a something we need to make sure that we we manage from a policy perspective.”
Burton said the utility is “definitely having an increase” in conversations with data centers looking to come to San Antonio.
“And some of those are requiring a lot more water than we’ve seen in the past,” he said. “And so there’s a large policy conversation about how do we use less water in that process.”
Councilman Ric Galvan (D6) has called for the city to look at opportunities for regulating the centers and track data center resource needs for growth.
Using data provided by his office, KSAT has mapped out data centers already in San Antonio, or which are soon expected.
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