The proximity to the power station makes Martin\u2019s neighborhood a desirable place to build data centers. <\/p>\n
Data centers need a lot of power to operate, and, depending on how they\u2019re cooled, a lot of water too. As more and more data center developers submit proposals to build in Texas, questions about how they\u2019ll impact Texas\u2019 grid and contribute to drought conditions across the state are widespread. <\/p>\n
So much so, that Gov. Greg Abbott effectively ordered a pause<\/a> on all data center projects looking to connect to the grid until officials get a better grasp on the amount of resources they will use.<\/p>\n For Martin, these concerns aren\u2019t just hypothetical. A year ago, a developer approached the city of San Marcos with a request to build a data center behind her ranch. She and many other residents of the city opposed it.<\/p>\n \u201c\u200aI love San Marcos,\u201d Martin said. \u201cThis is my home, and so I’m just standing up for it.\u201d<\/p>\n Martin grew up on the ranch in Hays County where she now tends to a herd of horses. She said, in this rural part of the county, power and water outages aren\u2019t uncommon.<\/p>\n Michael Minasi<\/p>\n \/<\/p>\n KUT News<\/p>\n Torrie Martin said some of her neighbors are being offered millions of dollars to sell their properties. <\/p>\n \u201cWe do have brownouts kind of regularly and we get our water shut off at least twice a month, usually [for] two or three hours, sometimes more,\u201d Martin said. <\/p>\n A brownout is a reduction in power availability. It can cause lights to flicker and appliances like washing machines or microwaves to run sluggishly or make weird noises. Repetitive brownouts put extra strain on machines and can shorten their lifespan.<\/p>\n Martin attributes these outages to new development happening in her neighborhood. She thinks the county is failing to keep up with road maintenance and keeping development in check. <\/p>\n “\u200a[The county’s] unable to give us water and power now,” Martin said, staring at the site of the proposed data center. “How are [they] gonna keep up with this?”<\/p>\n Water use and utility costs are often major concerns when a new data center is proposed. A recent poll by Gallup News<\/a> found that seven in 10 Americans oppose local construction of AI data centers. Half of those opposed cited water and power use as their primary reason. <\/p>\n In February, the San Marcos City Council voted<\/a> on a request for rezoning the property behind Martin\u2019s ranch. Approving the request would have cleared the way for the data center developer eyeing the land.<\/p>\n Hundreds of people attended the meeting, which stretched into the early hours of the next day. Speakers were overwhelmingly opposed to the idea of data center development in the area.<\/p>\n After nearly eight hours of public comment, the council voted to deny the request for rezoning \u2014 effectively blocking the data center. <\/p>\n At the meeting, speakers shared their worries about power costs, loss of green spaces and the increased use of artificial intelligence in society.<\/p>\n But the most prominent concern for residents was about water. <\/p>\n The San Marcos River is a huge part of the town’s identity, and some speakers wanted to know how the council was going to protect it. But it can be hard for local governments to know just how much water a data center will use.<\/p>\n Michael Minasi<\/p>\n \/<\/p>\n KUT News<\/p>\n The Vistra Hays Power Plant in San Marcos generates around 990 megawatts of power, enough to power 250,000 homes<\/p>\n Margaret Cook, the vice president of water and community resilience for the Houston Advanced Research Center, said there is an answer to how much water data centers are using.<\/p>\n Just not a satisfying one.<\/p>\n \u201cThe clear answer to the general question is it depends,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Cook said it depends primarily on two things: how big a data center is and what cooling technology it uses.<\/p>\n Small-to-mid-sized data centers don\u2019t necessarily have to use more water than a large subdivision or golf course. All the data centers in Texas today use less than 1%<\/a> of the state\u2019s water. For reference, Texas\u2019 manufacturing industry uses 7%.<\/p>\n That\u2019s rapidly changing as tech companies invest in AI data centers, which require more space, power and water to operate. Cook said by 2030, data centers could collectively consume anywhere between 29 and 161 billion gallons of water a year<\/a> \u2014 accounting for 0.5% to nearly 3% of the state\u2019s total water use. <\/p>\n But Cook said these are rough estimates. How much water a data center actually consumes depends on what system it uses to cool its servers. Most data centers either use air or water, but Cook said because it’s so hot in Texas, water is the preferred method.<\/p>\n \u201cWater is much more efficient at cooling than air is,\u201d Cook said. \u201cThat’s why on a hot day you’d probably rather jump in a pool than stand under a tree and try to get the airflow.\u201d<\/p>\n Michael Minasi<\/p>\n \/<\/p>\n KUT News<\/p>\n Some data centers also use immersion cooling \u2014 a method where servers are fully submerged in a special fluid. Immersion cooling, shown above, uses less water and electricity than other popular methods, but it hasn’t taken off on a mass scale. <\/p>\n Many data centers rely on what\u2019s called evaporative cooling \u2014 a process that uses water to absorb heat from the servers.<\/p>\n Cook said evaporative cooling can be an energy efficient way of cooling a data center. <\/p>\n But even though some of the water can be reused, new water is needed regularly to replace the water that evaporates. Closed loop systems are better, but even those come with trade-offs, Cook said.<\/p>\n In a closed loop, a coolant gets moved through a data center, pulling heat off of servers. As the fluid moves through the system, it gets hotter and hotter \u2014 and something else needs to cool it back down.<\/p>\n \u201cUse your body as an example: you can’t cool down unless something takes heat off of you,\u201d Cook said. \u201cSo you’re going to sweat, and \u2026 the air is going to pull the sweat off of you \u2026 and then your skin and your blood cool down, and that’s a closed loop system.\u201d<\/p>\n Just like how your body cools itself, some data centers use an air chiller to cool down that fluid, which can limit a data center\u2019s overall water usage to things like landscaping and flushing toilets.<\/p>\n Some data centers use water to cool down that fluid. Cook said in that case, a closed loop system can \u201cstill be very water intensive.” According to estimates from her team, data centers that use water to chill that coolant fluid could use up to half a billion gallons a year. <\/p>\n Not even state regulators know for certain how much water most data centers are using \u2014 and they have tried asking.<\/p>\n Earlier this year, the Public Utility Commission of Texas sent out a survey<\/a> to collect information about water and energy usage among data centers and cryptocurrency mining facilities. Less than a third of the state’s 341 data centers responded to the survey.<\/p>\n Connecting to the grid<\/p>\n Texas has had more success at figuring out how much electricity data centers use.<\/p>\n There are 248 known data centers planned for the state, according to an analysis from The Texas Tribune<\/a>. They are reported to use anywhere from 5 megawatts to 11,000 megawatts of power when operating at full capacity, according to the same analysis.<\/p>\n For reference, 1 megawatt is equivalent to the amount of electricity it takes to power 200 homes.<\/p>\n The state\u2019s power grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), has historically made it easy for new data centers to get up and running as long as the grid has enough electricity available. It would evaluate projects on an individual case-by-case basis as requests for electricity came in.<\/p>\n But doing that has become increasingly difficult as more and more developers look to build data centers and connect to the state\u2019s grid.<\/p>\n The Electric Reliability Council of Texas manages the state’s power grid and new connection requests. <\/p>\n As of April, ERCOT had requests for more than 400,000 megawatts of electricity from the grid. Nearly 89% of those requests came from data center developers, according to the organization.<\/p>\n \u201cAll of that is definitely not going to come online, but the question is, well, how much of it will?\u201d Brian Korgel, the director of the Energy Institute at University of Texas at Austin, said.<\/p>\n That uncertainty is a cause for concern for some people.<\/p>\n ERCOT, which is overseen by the PUC and the Texas Legislature, knows it needs to expand the state\u2019s power grid to account for all these new connection requests. But it doesn\u2019t know by how much, especially considering that large power users, such as data centers, often pop up in clusters.<\/p>\n \u201cYou’re not just going to add one new data center here, you’re probably going to add five or six in that location,\u201d Korgel said. \u201cSo [ERCOT is] moving to a new way of reviewing those projects. They’re calling it a \u2018batch process\u2019 where they will review like a cluster of proposed data centers in a geographical region.\u201d<\/p>\n ERCOT approved this \u201cbatch process\u201d in June and stopped evaluating requests on a project by project basis.<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/1785958456_710_.jpeg\"\/)
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