About 1,200 feet from Heather Peysen’s house on Three Way Road in Archer County, a company wants to build a data center that would pull 1,000 megawatts off the Texas grid — more than one percent of the record demand the entire state hit this summer. At 4:52 p.m. on Sept. 14 she filed a letter with state utility regulators asking them to audit it. By then the state had already agreed to ask a version of her questions, and had attached criminal exposure to one set of them.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the nonprofit that runs the power grid for most of the state, issued a market notice at 5:07 p.m. Sept. 14 launching what it calls a state and community impact survey. It goes to data centers conditionally accepted into the queue ERCOT is now sorting, and to any proposed facility asking for 25 to 75 megawatts — a wider net than the 461 projects ERCOT described to regulators three days earlier. Answers are due by 5 p.m. Oct. 12 with supporting documents and a notarized sworn statement. “Failure to respond to the RFI or any part thereof will be reported to the PUC and the Office of the Governor,” the notice says.
ERCOT wrote the water questions on behalf of the Texas Water Development Board, the agency that plans and finances the state’s water supply, and will pass those answers back to it. “In accordance with Texas Water Code 16.012,” the notice says, “any failure to fully respond to the questions in Section C may subject an RFI recipient to criminal penalties and other potential consequences.”
That language traces to a letter Gov. Greg Abbott sent the water board the same day. Major water users, Abbott wrote, “appear to have committed civil and criminal violations” by failing to return the board’s annual water-use survey. He directed the agency to refer violations “to the appropriate County or District Attorney” and to notify the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which may then deny the offender a water-rights permit, and gave it 30 days to report back. The board has said publicly that it is not a regulatory agency and cannot prosecute anyone. The Dispatch reported Sept. 3 that senators were told roughly 70 percent of surveyed data centers had ignored the survey.
In Archer County the project already has numbers attached to it. A frequently-asked-questions document prepared for the Archer County Commissioners Court and posted on the county’s website, on a page the county labels informational, names Google as the company and states that “Google has requested 1,000 MW (or 1 GW) for the proposed data center build out.” It puts maximum daily water use at 32,000 gallons, describes air-cooled chillers that “do not rely on water-based cooling towers,” and says the company would spend $3.5 million to $4.5 million upgrading a pump station and replacing about 9.5 miles of pipeline for the Wichita Valley Water Supply Corporation. It also says the project “is not currently planning to use energy or behind-the-meter sources such as natural gas, solar, wind, or BESS.” In plain terms, it would bring its own water money and none of its own power.
Google has never publicly said it is building in Archer County. Its own data center page lists Texas campuses in Ellis, Armstrong, Haskell, Wilbarger and Gray counties, and not Archer. The tax abatement application the Commissioners Court rejected unanimously on June 22 came not from Google but from an entity called Dynamo, whose manager the court’s certified minutes identify as Michael Monfort. Assistant County Attorney Tyler Sales told the court that day, according to those minutes, that “by not agreeing to a tax abatement, the county has no way to hold them accountable.” County officials made the same complaint to a Senate panel on Sept. 1.
Fifteen more comments from area residents landed in two state dockets on Sept. 14, most duplicated across both. Several track, nearly word for word, a template published by Texoma Data Center Watch, a neighbor-run group that says it is unaffiliated with Google, Dynamo, the county or any campaign. It tells residents to say “that a 1,000 MW request sits near your home, and that you want the audit applied to Project Raptor specifically.” Google is in the same proceeding on the other side, filing joint comments with other large power users urging faster grid connections; it told ERCOT’s board Sept. 14 it has committed $40 billion to Texas through 2027.
Responses are due Oct. 12. ERCOT expects to publish its report by Dec. 10, and the water board owes the governor its first enforcement update around Oct. 14.