EMILY KWONG: Hey, Short Wavers. Emily Kwong here with NPR alum, now Independent science writer, Dan Charles.
DAN CHARLES: Hi, Emily.
EMILY KWONG: Hi. So I hear you just got back from the front lines of the California water wars.
The Trump administration has announced a plan to kill Biden-era drinking water limits on four Pfas “forever chemicals”, and to delay the implementation of standards for two other compounds.
The Environmental Protection Agency is proposing two separate rules to delay and rescind the limits. The rules must go through an approval process that can take several years, and almost certainly will be challenged in court.
Data centers use vast amounts of water primarily for evaporative cooling, spraying it into the air or over coils to cool hot air generated by servers in order to keep the equipment from failing. The largest data centers can consume between 1 and 5 million gallons of water daily, with consumption rising during the summer.
There are currently 286 data centers in California, and more are on the way. A very large new data center is targeted to be built by 2028 in Imperial, a small city 115 miles east of San Diego. The 950,000-square-foot center could be the largest operating statewide, taking up 17 football fields’ worth of land.
California officials announced Friday that the State Water Project will deliver more water than expected in 2026.
The Department of Water Resources increased the project’s water allocation to 45% from 30% of requested supplies. The allocation tells the state’s 29 public water agencies how much water they can expect to receive. Those agencies supply water to 27 million Californians and irrigate about 750,000 acres of farmland.
Data center builders don’t tell the public how much water they use, according to a new report — and the industry is encroaching into water-stressed and vulnerable communities.
The report, by the think tank Next10 and researchers at Santa Clara University, finds that planned data centers — the ganglia of artificial intelligence — are spreading to regions reliant on overtapped groundwater and strained surface water, with potentially major effects in the Central and Imperial Valleys.
The US government has proposed a plan for the drought stricken Colorado River that could cut up to 40% of current supplies to Arizona, California and Nevada, as the waterway’s reservoirs continue to plunge to critically low levels.
A top Arizona water official shared details of the Trump administration’s plan at a state meeting on Wednesday.
“We’re running out of water.”
That blunt warning from Republican Congressman Michael Cloud, who represents Corpus Christi in the U.S. House, captures how dire the situation has become in the South Texas coastal city, where falling reservoir levels and looming mandatory cuts have brought officials closer to the prospect of severe water shortages across its primary reservoir system.
Nevada, along with its sister states of California and Arizona, has proposed taking a significant cut to its share of the Colorado River, pending approval from officials from each state.
Through a news release earlier this month, the Lower Colorado River Basin states of Nevada, California and Arizona said they are willing to up their commitment to stabilize the river’s water supply with a plan that would deliver up to 3.2 million acre-feet of water savings through 2028.
Among the leading experts who study the Colorado River, Anne Castle stands out.
During the Obama administration, she was assistant secretary for water and science at the Interior Department. During the Biden administration, she served on the Upper Colorado River Commission. She is now a senior fellow at the University of Colorado Law School Getches-Wilkinson Center.
Golden mussels may be small, but experts say they could create major problems for California’s water systems, prompting urgent warnings to local water agencies across Kern County.
“The message we’re trying to convey today is the mussels are here. They’re down the water project. They’re here. We’re dealing with them now,” Said Samuel Lux, President of Diversified Project Services International.
