By Melanie Cooley & Charlie Alcorn, Sustainable Desert Living Educators
This article has been updated on July 13 to reflect updated stats and information
We, like many of you, try our best to make choices that contribute to a sustainable future for this gorgeous desert and the creatures, plants, and people who inhabit it – even when those choices cost us a bit of extra effort. At WMG, we call this living hydro-local, and we’re part of a broad movement to restore the health of our watershed, including raising our aquifer and restoring river flow. That’s why we fundamentally disagree with the Pima County Supervisors’ vote to approve Project Blue, which will sell 290 acres of public land to an out-of-state firm that plans to build a water-guzzling data center campus.
Now is the time for the community to speak up for how we value water and how we think our local water should be valued and protected. We share ways you can take action below.
Let’s talk water numbers for a moment: The average residential water use per Tucsonan is 74 gallons a day (as of 2023-24). That number has been dropping for two decades as Tucsonans make daily choices to reduce our water consumption. In other words, the choices we make to install greywater systems, use rainwater harvesting for landscaping, and reduce our tap water use make a difference. While we’ve been conserving water, strategic efforts and partnerships have been raising aquifer levels and bringing flow back to our rivers. A lot more of this restoration work is being planned and implemented every day. Good work, Tucson!
So how will a data center campus’s water use impact our efforts towards a sustainable water future? One of the many unanswered questions about Project Blue–and most other data center projects– is how much water it will use. Public sources say a data center campus* uses between 300,000 and 5 million gallons of water a day. According to recent reporting from the Arizona Daily Star, the fairground site is just the first of three data center campuses that are being planned. If we compare the daily water use of three data center campuses to average residential daily water use, that’s the water use equivalent of adding roughly 12,000 - 200,000 residents to Pima County. For reference, the population of Tucson is 547,239 people, as of 2023.
Pima County says that Project Blue aligns with the goals of the City of Tucson’s One Water 2100 Plan, but we are concerned that the promises that have been made will not come to fruition. In multiple instances around the world, data centers have been discovered to be using 4 to 15 times as much water as they initially claimed. Even Supervisor Chairman Rex Scott, who voted in favor of Project Blue, implicitly acknowledged as much when he said, “Plans and promises have been made that if they are fulfilled, could make this project a model for how to balance economic development and environmental protection.” The scale of Project Blue means that a failure to fulfill those promises would have a significant negative impact on our region’s water resilience. A negative impact on water resilience is a negative impact on economic resilience and growth.
Proponents of Project Blue have been emphasizing the use of reclaimed water as evidence of the project’s water sustainability—but this is not immediately true. Project Blue is slated to use potable city water for the first two years with the “goal” of transitioning to reclaimed water, according to Scott. We are concerned that there are no protections that this loose promise would be upheld. Supervisor Jen Allen, who voted against Project Blue, spoke eloquently on the promises that have been made to other communities that accepted building data centers and the promises that were broken. She has since elaborated (in an email to constituents) that, “there was extensive reporting on the economic impact of the proposed data centers, but little to no actual information on the impact of data centers on our water, air, energy, and climate. That means that all of the claims that this project would be ‘water positive’ and ‘sustainable’ were not coming from environmental experts; but rather, from the private developer who stands to profit from this deal.” [emphasis in original]
The Tucson region is in the grip of a 30-year drought, with below-historical-average rainfall since 1994, meaning that less rain and snowmelt runoff is replenishing our groundwater, causing vegetation loss and rising temperatures. Our Colorado River water allotment is also uncertain, as the river is experiencing a decades-long drought and the compact allocations are currently being renegotiated. Reclaimed water is a critical element of our sustainable future, as the City of Tucson has acknowledged in its “toilet-to-tap” plans, an endeavor that WMG supports.
Furthermore, reclaimed water is just as valuable and precious as our Colorado River water, groundwater, and stormwater. It’s a vital part of creating a sustainable future for our region. According to the One Water 2100 Plan, a sustainable future for Tucson “places equal value on all water as integrated and viable sources for the community.”
According to Pima County’s FAQs, Project Blue’s use of reclaimed water will not impact Tucson’s existing Santa Cruz River Heritage Project. That’s good news. For years, that project has been releasing reclaimed water into the Santa Cruz to restore flow, creating habitat for wildlife and beautiful riverbanks for people to enjoy. WMG is focused on restoring, among others, Sabino Creek, Tanque Verde Creek, the Rillito River, and additional stretches of the Santa Cruz River.
Imagine for a moment what else we could do to restore our watershed and replenish our shallow groundwater area wetlands with the millions of gallons of water that Project Blue will consume every year. Instead, we are faced with a proposition from an energy and water intensive industry that does not align with our community’s goals and values. Now is the time to apply our values and choose economic growth that supports our water and energy resilience for generations to come. Project Blue isn’t it.
So what can we do? How can you help?
Project Blue’s next stop is with the Tucson City Council. The Mayor and Council must approve annexation of the land to gain access to reclaimed water. They will be discussing Project Blue at their study session on August 6th and voting on it at the meeting on August 19th. We can stop it there.
Actions
- Contact the Mayor and Council to voice your concerns and opposition to Project Blue as soon as possible. They need to hear from you now while they are forming their opinions. You can call to ask what your Council person’s position is and to voice your opposition. You can also email them. Not sure what Ward you are in? You can find your Ward on the Ward Map.
- Plan to attend the Mayor and Council Study Session on August 6th and the vote on August 19th to voice your opinion. You can find more details on how to participate on the city website.
Key Points
- Our water needs to be protected for our community’s quality of life, including our urban forests, parks, rivers, wildlife, and long-term water security.
- Reclaimed water is an important water supply to help meet these quality of life goals and restore our watershed.
- Data centers operate at massive scales and with limited transparency about their water use. The promises made frequently don’t align with the actual impact of data center projects.
- We cannot afford to move forward with Project Blue without a thorough and independent environmental impact study and transparency about the true impacts of Project Blue.
* The initial version of this blog post calculated water use with the understanding that the water use statistics were for individual data center buildings. They are for data center campuses. The blog has been updated accordingly.
