Senate Water Panel to Weigh Data-Center Cooling Demand and Water-Transparency Rules

The Texas Senate Committee on Water, Agriculture and Rural Affairs will gavel in at 9 a.m. Sept. 1 to take invited and public testimony on a single interim charge: how much water the state’s data centers and other energy-intensive industries consume, and what Texas should require them to disclose. Public testimony is limited to two minutes per witness, and anyone filing written testimony must bring 15 copies for the committee clerk and email a digital copy, according to the hearing notice. The Senate runs no online comment portal, so the hearing room is the only place to be heard.

Sen. Charles Perry, R–Lubbock, chairs the seven-member committee — four Republicans and three Democrats — with Sen. Kevin Sparks, R–Midland, as vice chair, according to Texas Legislature Online. The panel’s jurisdiction covers the Texas Water Development Board, the state’s groundwater conservation districts and the regional water planning process — machinery that is being rebuilt around a $20 billion funding commitment voters approved last November, just as an unplanned-for industry arrives at the tap.

The charge, Assessing the Water Demands of Energy-Intensive Technologies, directs members to examine current water consumption rates for high-consumption cooling technologies, including data centers, and to recommend ways to improve transparency for local water providers while ensuring industrial growth does not compromise the affordability of water for Texas residents and agricultural producers.

The number likely to anchor the testimony comes from a white paper the Houston Advanced Research Center released Jan. 21. HARC estimated that existing Texas data centers already consume roughly 25 billion gallons of water a year, counting both on-site cooling and the water used to generate the electricity they draw. By 2030, the paper put the range at 29 billion to 161 billion gallons annually, or as much as 2.7 percent of all water used in the state. Its sharpest finding is procedural rather than numerical: the State Water Plan leans on historical data and does not forecast data center growth, which the authors called a structural blind spot. ERCOT has begun building an interconnection process for very large electric loads; no parallel process exists on the water side.

Funding is no longer the binding constraint. Texas voters approved Proposition 4 on Nov. 4, 2025, dedicating the first $1 billion a year in net sales tax revenue above $46.5 billion to the Texas Water Fund through Aug. 31, 2047 — about $20 billion over two decades, beginning in 2027. The Texas Dispatch reported in June that the House Natural Resources Committee took up the Prop 4 rollout and data center water use in the same sitting, a pairing the Senate panel is now repeating from the other chamber.

The transparency half of the charge lands on a gap the Dispatch has documented. Across much of the state, no agency limits how much groundwater a data center pumps, a House panel was told in June. In May, the Blanco-Pedernales Groundwater Conservation District asked lawmakers for explicit authority to deny permits tied to data center projects — the first formal appeal of its kind from a Texas groundwater district. Municipal utilities face a related problem: a city water manager negotiating a service agreement with a multinational operator generally has no statutory right to be told what the facility will actually use.

The affordability clause gives the committee’s rural members their opening. Four of the seven senators represent districts where irrigated agriculture, not server capacity, is the dominant water use, and the charge explicitly ties industrial growth to what residents and producers pay. Expect questions about where new load is siting relative to stressed aquifers, and about whether “water-lean” alternatives such as dry cooling and treated brackish supply should be encouraged in statute rather than left to negotiation.

Because this is an interim hearing, the committee will take no votes and no legislation is before it. What senators hear will shape the panel’s interim report and the water bills filed for the 90th Legislature, which convenes in January 2027.

Meeting at a glance

Committee members

• Sen. Charles Perry, R–Lubbock (SD-28) — Chair
• Sen. Kevin Sparks, R–Midland (SD-31) — Vice Chair
• Sen. César Blanco, D–El Paso (SD-29)
• Sen. Roland Gutierrez, D–San Antonio (SD-19)
• Sen. Adam Hinojosa, R–Corpus Christi (SD-27)
• Sen. Lois W. Kolkhorst, R–Brenham (SD-18)
• Sen. José Menéndez, D–San Antonio (SD-26)