Sierra Club Urges Texas Senate to Mandate Better Water Reporting and Planning for Data Centers & Power Plants

The Sierra Club's Texas chapter is pushing state lawmakers to require data centers to report how much water they use now and expect to use in the future. The Texas Senate Committee on Water, Agriculture, and Rural Affairs held a hearing on the issue, and the group wants the Texas Public Utility Commission and Texas Water Development Board to factor those numbers into state water planning, along with the water used by the gas and coal power plants that supply data centers with electricity.

The concern is scale. Data centers themselves use water, but the power plants running them use far more. Texas gas and coal plants have consumed roughly 100 billion gallons of water a year for nearly a decade. In 2024, gas plants alone used 56 billion gallons and coal plants used 34 billion. Meanwhile, data centers in Texas already draw 12 gigawatts of power and make up 15% of the state grid's electricity use, with requests for another 426 gigawatts of data centers waiting in line to connect. Wind and solar power, by contrast, need little to no water to generate electricity.

None of this changes anything for your house directly right now. But it points to a broader tension between growing electricity demand and limited water supplies in Texas, which can eventually affect utility planning, power reliability, and costs. The Senate committee is expected to release recommendations in December on how to track and limit water use by large industrial power users like data centers and the plants that feed them.