Pinal County holds work session on data centers; ASU, utilities and state agency outline water, power and community trade-offs
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Summary
Arizona State University, utilities APS and SRP, and the Arizona Commerce Authority briefed Pinal County supervisors on data-center growth, noting site-specific water impacts, utility queue pressures (gigawatts of requests), and tools — permits, load agreements and ordinances — counties can use to manage impacts.
Kelly Barr of Arizona State University introduced a Pinal County work session on data centers, saying rapid growth driven by cloud services and AI has put Arizona "in the purple area" for industry expansion and prompted the county to seek more information on water, power and community effects.
The presentations that followed laid out a sequence of site-specific risks and regulatory tools. "By the 2026, global data center usage will top 1,050 terawatt hours," Kelly Barr said, underscoring the industry’s scale and energy appetite. He described three facility types — small server rooms, colocation facilities and hyperscale campuses that can require hundreds of megawatts — and said location choices are driven by tax, utility and network incentives.
Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at ASU’s Morrison Institute, told supervisors that current data show data centers are not, on the whole, creating a statewide water crisis in Arizona’s Active Management Areas (AMAs). "Right now, data center use is not a water problem," she said, but she emphasized the site-specific nature of water demand and the evolving technologies used for cooling. Porter explained the difference between closed-loop and evaporative cooling, noted that evaporative systems can drive much higher day-to-day water use, and recommended that officials scrutinize whether proposed projects rely on replenished water supplies, reclaimed water, or un‑replenished groundwater subject to ADWR industrial‑use permitting.
Porter put water quantities in context: an acre‑foot is about 325,851 gallons and, on average in Arizona, one acre‑foot supplies roughly 3.5 single‑family homes per year (Department of Water Resources estimate). She also said reporting requirements and assured‑water‑supply designations held by many providers limit the locations where high‑volume users can obtain service.
From the power side, Patrick Bogle, director of data‑center strategy at APS, told the board APS served an 8.6‑gigawatt peak last summer and has committed to provide up to 4.5 gigawatts of data‑center load it judges it can serve reliably. He said APS is tracking more than 20 gigawatts of additional interest in its queue but does not presently have the infrastructure to serve all of it. "We are not going to serve more data center load in the APS service territory if we cannot do it reliably or affordably," Bogle said, and outlined a toolkit that includes tariff service, bilateral load‑commitment agreements, and collateral requirements to prevent cost shifts to other ratepayers.
Nate Tate of SRP described a "cluster" planning approach SRP is using to model many large interconnection requests together and identify shared infrastructure needs. He said SRP is studying a cluster of roughly 24 projects totaling a little over 7,000 megawatts; the utility attributes network upgrade costs to the customers that require them and is working to sequence long‑lead transmission work.
Ryan Reese of the Arizona Commerce Authority framed data centers as critical digital infrastructure with large construction investments and modest permanent staffing compared with the number of temporary construction jobs. He said most modern projects work with closed‑loop cooling and that technology and site design have evolved quickly, reducing some historic concerns about continuous water withdrawals and noise.
Supervisors pressed presenters on verification — how the county can know a developer’s claimed water and power pathways are real — and on policy choices about how much data‑center growth to welcome. Presenters recommended requiring ADWR industrial‑use permits or verified water‑provider commitments, checking assured‑water‑supply and large‑water‑user ordinances, using load‑commitment agreements and collateral on the power side, and planning zoning and siting to steer large campuses to appropriate locations.
What’s next: presenters and staff said the county will continue the work‑session series, gather more data on local water and power availability, and use permitting and zoning processes to require developers to demonstrate adequate supplies and mitigation. The presentations did not produce immediate regulatory action but gave the board technical context for future agenda items and permitting decisions.
