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KEY POINTS
The Illinois General Assembly did not pass the POWER Act before the state’s legislative session ended earlier this week.
The bill would have required data centers to source or supply renewable energy and submit quarterly water use reports.
This week, the United Nations published a report warning that global generative AI training was straining grids and impacting water sources.
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Illinois lawmakers this week failed to pass landmark legislation that would have required data centers in the state to publicly disclose their water usage and adhere to a strict set of energy and environmental standards.
Supported by climate watchdogs and legal experts as a precedent-setting policy for data center transparency around the country, the POWER Act did not advance to a General Assembly vote before the state’s legislative session ended on May 31.
“The threat to our electric grid, our wallets, and our environment is only growing,” says Kari Ross, the Midwest energy affordability advocate with the Natural Resources Defense Council, in a statement. “It is deeply frustrating that the General Assembly did not cross the finish line this year while deciding to continue to provide millions of taxpayer dollars to data centers in incentives against the Governor’s vision.”
Illinois is home to 115 operating data centers, with at least 67 new campuses planned. These include several hyperscale projects proposed for the northern half of the state in communities where groundwater aquifers are running imminently dry: a 1.6 gigawatt campus in Grayslake, a 1.8 gigawatt campus in Joliet, and another 1.8 gigawatt campus in Yorkville.
Combined, these three locations alone are estimated to require roughly 80 percent of the electricity currently used by the entire state’s homes. By 2040, it is projected that data centers will account for at least 37 percent of Illinois’ total energy needs — demand that is being met in large part by increased production at, or the new construction of, nuclear, coal, and natural gas plants.
Had the POWER Act passed, Illinois data centers would have been required to “develop, procure, or source their own new, deliverable clean energy and capacity resources” — via solar, wind, or battery generation — in order to come online.
Illinois communities will also miss out on increased freshwater protections and reporting transparency. The act required data centers to provide “detailed accounting” of their water intake, including differentiating between withdrawals and consumption, and submit publicly accessible quarterly water use reports to the Illinois State Water Survey, a nongovernmental research organization in Champaign. All data centers would also have been required to sit at least 200 feet away from any potable supply of drinking water and residence, reducing the risk of groundwater contamination during construction or effluent discharges.
Crucially, concerns about cooling and indirect water usage — the water consumption and withdrawals of power-generating sources — would also have been addressed: “The owner or operator of the data center shall include in the analysis an evaluation of water use at the data center and at the site of energy generation, an evaluation of the impact of water use on the source water and scarcity, and consider closed-loop cooling as one of the alternatives,” the bill reads.
Closed-loop systems, though more energy-intensive ways of cooling data center servers, have been shown to reduce water consumption on-site from potentially millions of gallons, to thousands of gallons per day.
“This is exactly what Big Tech wanted — for legislative leadership to kick the can down the road on enacting these critical guardrails so that they can get as many more data centers approved as possible,” Jen Walling, CEO of the Illinois Environment Council, says in a statement. “How many more of these projects will get approved before state leaders act, and what will the consequences of that inaction look like for our grid, our water, our land, and our communities?”
Lawmakers’ failure to pass the POWER Act coincides this week with the publication of the United Nations University’s first-ever report warning of the global energy and water impact of generative AI.
According to the UN analysis, the “water footprint” during the production of electricity for data centers globally last year was 1.2 trillion gallons, more than the annual household needs of the entire population of Illinois. By 2030, this figure is expected to more than double to 2.5 trillion gallons — enough water to meet the domestic needs of sub-Saharan Africa’s 1.3 billion people for an entire year.
On the same day, Google announced a plan to replenish more freshwater than the company consumes by 2030. A total of 165 projects across 97 U.S. watersheds, the company says, will return 19 billion gallons of water to ecosystems and communities once these efforts are fully completed — more than double the volume the company consumed in 2024, according to self-reported figures.
Header Image: A biofuels plant in Illinois. Photo by J. Carl Ganter / Circle of Blue
