Feds demand compromise on Colorado River while states flounder
nevadacurrent.com
nevadacurrent.com
It's not just Nevada, but Nevada is the poster child here for everything that's gone wrong with water use.
So something's gotta give. And it turns out that farming in deserts may not have been the best use of the land (or water).
The government basically asked for it, and then made it the only way to get much of the land. And now of course, many heads in government now complaining about the evil private land owner who did the thing the government asked for and precondition.
>A hundred plus years later
I know of people still investing large sums today to claim under the Desert Land Act. It's still active. They need to establish irrigation and usually drill/share a well (maybe hauling could work but you have to show it's economically viable), and establish that over a multi year proof process the viability of the land. Just harder than it used to be. So to be clear it might be someone from yesterday, although it's just less common. I'm not sure if the takings clause would cover them though, as they don't technically own it until the proof process is complete, so for them it'd probably merely just be a total loss.
Is that actually taken into account in a taking? I haven’t thought about this stuff in decades, and I know there is some weirdness with regulatory takings.
Another way to frame the question: if the government just changes the water rights per acre, does that itself trigger the takings clause?
This respects water rights while aligning incentives to conserve water and as a bonus establishes a more even playing field in the agricultural sector, enhancing competition and reducing the unjust profits of the Resnicks' shady water empire.
Like 60-75% of all ag land in the US is to grow feed for cows. Mostly in dry environments. This is because the old water rights were distributed on a "use it or lose it" basis which encourages wasteful use.
This doesn't apply to many places but in the desert Mountain West this is often the case. Also, while it may seem surprising, a few crops really thrive in the high desert e.g. onions.
Because moving water to where the fertile land is is easier than vice versa. And because agriculture is the base on which civilization rests.
https://www.snwa.com/water-resources/where-water-comes-from/...
https://www.snwa.com/assets/images/colorado-river-allocation...
For indoor usage in Las Vegas for example, it recycles 99% of it:
Using water in the desert is a problem, but point to CA or AZ as poster children of abuse for that
This is why you see California with such a large share of the Colorado River's water rights, even though it "touches" the river the least: they were the earliest fast-growing state to "use" that water. And that's why you see so many water-hungry crops being grown in the West--the owners have the rights already, and to them, if they don't use it, they'll lose it.
So any agreement here needs to make a compromise between states, the federal government, prior settled law, and owners with effectively "free" water that don't want it taken away from them.
It's a complicated issue, but one step would be to force private owners of water rights to list their rights on an open market (right now some owners of water rights, like the Imperial Irrigation District can choose to never sell them). At least that way you can start the conversation somewhere.
(In fact, John Wesley Powell, namesake of Lake Powell, argued strongly against "prior appropriation" before the area was even settled, and instead argued against a collective approach to the limited and volatile amount of freshwater. He did not succeed.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wesley_Powell#Environment...
Water rights in the West are hard, and we've known that since John Wesley Powell was in charge, as a nearby commenter explained. The Colorado was divided up during an unusually wet year a long time ago, and rising demand and falling supply have only made things worse ever since.
You don't need to force them, they've done it for decades to the extent it is allowed. I've owned titled water rights in Nevada. They are worth something but not nearly as much as many people likely assume.
Nevada has additional complications due to the structure of the aquifers. It is difficult/impossible to move water from where it is to where it may be needed.
Guess - you're referring not to the aquifers themselves, but to the shape of the watersheds. Especially to the "water doesn't naturally flow along roller coaster tracks" topography of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basin_and_Range_Province
Sometimes the valleys have good wells but that isn't guaranteed due to the geology of Nevada. Lots of brine, sulfur, hydrocarbons, hot springs, etc. You never know what you are going to get and the fresh water eventually mixes into this underground.
I just finished reading it and can highly recommend it. Zak's writing is enjoyable and refreshing.
How about building these plants in areas with plenty of water. Many places located to these areas (Arizona) due to their lax labor and environmental laws.
That’s the problem. There aren’t that many areas with plenty of water.
Otherwise... go pound sand.
Money is a resource. Someone has to deal with the utility rate hikes that tend to follow large new consumers - even when the AI bubble bursts in a few years, the electricity prices will stay high (or in the worst case, get even higher) because the utility needs to recoup its investments.
> How do they not bring tax revenue? Do you not have property taxes? Maybe go lobby for those then.
Forgot the /s? Seriously, property taxes are a joke because the "wealth" generated by the datacenters is absurdly high compared to their property lot size. If you were to extract the appropriate amount of taxes to cover for the costs, you'd have to raise them so high that you'd strangle the entire rest of your local economy. And stuff like we have here in Europe, taxing corporate profits, is not applicable as well because the profit is officially being made at some Delaware site (or Ireland in our case), not at some random datacenter.
It seems like new power generation should be a trivial concern, the upper Midwest is incredibly windy. The block to adding new generation is mostly antiquated local/state laws about connecting to the grid interchange. It's within local power to fix that. It's the power company lobbying against more cheap energy that causes prices to rise. Point your anger at the people sitting in the way of more capacity not the people wanting to use power.
> Forgot the /s? Seriously, property taxes are a joke because the "wealth" generated by the datacenters is absurdly high compared to their property lot size.
Then assess them on that basis. Property tax isn't a function of square feet, you can assess it on the basis of economic value. Property tax is a local issue, just vote to change the law.
It's still waste. When the bubble pops, and it will pop, all these data centers will not be around as consumers any more. Just look what happened after the dot-com crash, and I'm not alone in thinking that the AI crash will be even worse than that.
And once again, it will be the taxpayers left with the bill, with half-constructed ruins being a blight on their neighborhoods, and with homeless moving in to the ruins and causing fires and police calls.
> Property tax isn't a function of square feet, you can assess it on the basis of economic value. Property tax is a local issue, just vote to change the law.
Good luck trying to stand up as a community of, say, 10.000 people against the lawyers of a multi-billion dollar company. They will find loopholes or in the worst case get your entire law tossed out in court.
That is why people are pissed, they know that the rich can afford to do whatever the fuck they want, with zero respects for the people affected by it.
Commercial power is often charged differently than residential power, and there's also nothing that prevents charging disproportionately higher rates for e.g. 90th percentile power usage.
There's nothing inherent that means a data center in a locale should cause individual residential customers to pay more.
Well the utility will have to make investments that are on a depreciation schedule anywhere on the scale of 20-50 years... so there will have to be a general rate hike to cover for the bank loan (banks aren't stupid, they want at least something in incoming cashflow increase), and when the AI bubble pops, guess who will have their rates hiked a second or third time? Yup the average consumers.
Probably best to just let it stay an industrial wasteland shithole rather than put datacenters there.
That seems to be the attitude unfortunately.
https://www.wthr.com/article/news/investigations/13-investig...
I'm sure there have been some datacenters that have tried to use "brings in jobs" incentives, and that could certainly go wrong if the incentives aren't designed correctly (e.g. proportional to the actual number of jobs), but as long as there aren't incentives being abused, a datacenter should be a net win.
Who said anything about diverting it? Pump cold water out, store hot water until it cools to ambient temps, then dump it back in the lake.
> Scott Walker needed good PR and promised huge tax credits without much in the way of assurances.
Yeah, this is my point, the state wasn't actually prepared to see the deal through despite nominally being industry friendly vs Arizona where they have some follow through.
That is <10% of the amount of water required to grow corn on the same land as the data center. Acre for acre, data centers consume a tiny fraction of the water consumed by agriculture.
Are the corn subsidies to produce high-fructose corn syrup and ethanol that important?
Quick back-of-the-napkin suggest that it's about as much as would fit in a round pool just under 500ft (~150 meters) across, 6ft (1.8 meters) deep.
East of the Rockies this is an unnoticeable amount of water.
The laws of nature may agree with you but the laws of man do not and lawfulness comes at great expense.
8.4M US gal/year * 3.785 US gal/litre / (365 24 60 * 60) = 1 litre per second.
Put another way, if the average US household uses 138 US gal/day [0] then this is 8.4M / 365 / 138 = 168 average households.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residential_water_use_in_the_U...
No they do not. The flow there is already balanced, and lake levels are lower than usual.
New York already added another tap for electric generation about 12ish years ago, and IMHO it has had an effect.
You aren't going to meaningfully drain the lakes to cool chip fabs when the vast majority of that water will simply go back into the lake either directly or via the water cycle. It's not going to run off the land and into a river like with flood irrigation or similarly irresponsible water uses. The entire global chip industry today uses less water than the city of Hong Kong.
Keep repeating the script. Short term profit at the expense of long term stability.
Besides it’s not just the evaporation. The leftover water concentrates a lot of the impurities that already exist in the water, and not all of it ends up in proper treatment facilities, which in turn pollutes the place wherever it ends up being. This is actually a problem in parts of Oregon. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/data-c...
> This is actually a problem in parts of Oregon
The problem in that part of Oregon was preexisting contamination in the drinking water.
"the county’s underground water supply had been tainted with nitrates — a byproduct of chemical fertilizers used by the megafarms and food processing plants where most of his constituents worked."
Discharging a little data center water back into lake Michigan isn't going to make any difference. The entire discharge of ever data center in the world wouldn't register.
At present Michigan-Huron is close to the 100 year average (https://www.glerl.noaa.gov/blog/2025/06/23/great-lakes-water...).
The big contributor is that we've not had particularly wet years overall since 2020.
Also the speed of light might be a bit slow.