Oklahoma legislators who used a state water bill to target data centers and prevent them from using too much water for cooling purposes await the Governor’s decision on the bill they passed last week. It’s an attempt to prevent the kind of misuse of water recently discovered in Georgia where a data center used 30 million gallons of water without paying for it.
Rep. Nick Archer, R-Elk City, used a water bill to propose his amendment in the form of SB259 which eventually was approved May 14 on a Senate vote of 38-10 and a House vote on the same day of 88-1. The measure puts restrictions on water use by data centers and allows only if the AI facility uses what is called a “closed-loop, dielectric immersion or other comparably low consumptive cooling technologies that recirculate groundwater and minimize consumptive loss” as determined by the Oklahoma Water Board.
At last word, the bill had been sent to the Governor for his signature but there was no indication he had signed the measure.
On the day Rep. Archer presented his amendment to the House Energy and Natural Resources Committee in April, Rep. Archer told others on the committee.
“so what this amendment looks to do is it says that if groundwater is the primary cooling source for a data center, that that facility must use closed loop, they must use dielectric cooling fluid, it must be air cooled, some form of low consumptive water cooling mechanism. And so when you see all of the scary water usage numbers from data centers and those kinds of things, but those are from traditional evaporative cooling units. And so groundwater is a precious resource, we need to protect that.”
His amendment was also supported by Rep. Carl Newton, R-Cherokee, who sponsored the original bill, which would require meters to measure permitted use of groundwater, explained the measure and his reason for creating it.