It goes somewhat against the grain of Louisiana’s history of minimal government interference, but it might be time to for the state to adopt a comprehensive water management policy. And it has the means to do it if it gets to it.
Louisiana’s growing success with attracting data centers has introduced concerns about power and water provision. To date, estimates provided by potential locators have indicated no one of them will cause a shortage of power or produce a spike in costs nor cause a water shortage or even significantly deplete any particular source.
But success breeds success, and if the data centers keep coming, trouble will follow unless local governments decide to cut them off, forgoing tremendous economic development opportunities. While the Louisiana Public Service Commission can plan out the power side of things, an equivalent planning process on the water side has yet to surface.
Not that it hasn’t been suggested. Over the past nearly 70 years almost all of a dozen reports from various agencies on water management in the state have recommended at least some state policy coordination regarding the 11 primary aquifers and aquifer systems present within state boundaries and the ten primary surface water basins, from which there is (as of 2020) authority spread out over nine separate agencies (and with at least 735 other entities having local, municipal, regional, or state authority for specific water resource oversight).
Data suggest that drawdowns have become ongoing from certain supplies, which with data centers popping up would accelerate. This could become problematic in that a host of centers dispersed many dozens of miles apart could tap into the same source, with each center under the jurisdiction of a different provider, almost always a government, or even outside of any oversight if a center wishes to drill or pump out its own, that provides for no planning for use of that source which threatens to deplete it..
The state Legislature began to address this by passing a little-known law this year that attracted zero attention outside of a few special interests and legislators. Act 418 created the CURRENT Authority – the Coordinated Use of Resources for Recreation, Economy, Navigation, and Transportation Authority. The law addresses flood control, risk reduction, navigation, and water resource management and is intended to act as a kind of inland Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority.
Coming into existence Aug. 1, it orders other parts of state government and local governments to coordinate with it on water resource policy. It is governed by a board housed within the Department of Transportation and Development, which as yet has no appointees (mostly defaults from agencies or by the governor if he wishes, plus a couple of interest group nominees) to it. Like the CPRA, it is to develop a master plan of six years duration minimum for approval by the Legislature, along with annual plans guided by it, that manages integrated projects including those offered by the private sector.
There are other things it is to do unrelated to water resource management, and in fact of the major things perhaps management was intended as the least important, but the CURRENT Authority is there with the power to deal with the question of straining water resources. To fund its activities, it may draw upon the Natural Resources Trust Authority and issue debt. The NRTA, itself established last year, gathers funds from companies engaged in drilling wells as collateral against abandoned properties, plus whatever else budgeters throw in. That collection process only began this fiscal year in the wake of a scandal involving a previous setup.
So, things are off to a slow start, which perhaps should be hastened in light of the data center boom. In particular, ideological opponents of centers – because these promise significantly higher consumption of fossils fuels which is anathema to the cult of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming – increasingly bring up water needs as part of a everything-but-the-kitchen-sink strategy to curb big power users from expanding their footprints. Moving more quickly on the CURRENT Authority to ease such tactics as well as more legitimate concerns will pay dividends.
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