Gov. Greg Abbott directed state energy agencies to protect residents from costs due to the expansion of data centers across the state in a June 10 letter.
The governor’s letter to Thomas Gleeson, chairman of the Public Utility Commission of Texas, and Pablo Vegas, CEO of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, required the agencies to identify additional ways to protect ratepayers in communities surrounding data centers. A joint memo of their suggestions is required by July 17. According to Abbott’s press release, the PUC has to reduce transmission costs for residents in these areas by July 31.
“The rapid scale of data center development requires oversight to ensure everyday Texans are not burdened with the costs of infrastructure driven by data center expansion, and to ensure that as data centers interconnect to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) grid, residential electric bills are not negatively affected,” Abbott wrote in the letter.
Generating electricity for U.S. data centers uses large amounts of water; in 2023 alone, these centers consumed enough electricity to power about 12% of U.S. households, according to American Rivers, an organization that advocates for protecting waterways.
By 2050, the U.S. Energy Information Administration projects combined electricity use for data center servers to make up 22-33% of all the electricity used by commercial buildings in the U.S.
Hannah Hopkins, an assistant professor of rhetoric and composition at Georgia State University, said while she was at UT earning her doctorate in English, she became involved with a project called “Bad AI and Beyond.” This project brought together people of different disciplines to look into the public’s perception of artificial intelligence, she said.
AI relies on data centers to store information and to house its large language models, according to CISCO, a technology infrastructure and data structure provider.
Hopkins said a big thing learned during this project was how easy it is for AI to cause harm.
“As we’re seeing in Texas and in Georgia, where I live, there are these smaller communities, rural communities and communities that are marginalized in different ways, who have been bearing the brunt of a lot of the environmental cost of AI infrastructure expansion,” Hopkins said.
In the letter, Abbott also listed items he plans to work on in the next legislative session, such as requiring new data centers to have water-efficient and noise-reduction technology, taking away sales tax exemptions for centers and mandating reports on water and electricity usage.
“As Texas continues to welcome innovation and investment, we must ensure that growth strengthens our people and their quality of life without placing undue burdens on Texans and local communities,” Abbott wrote.
