I built these buildings. Now I am doing the water math in public.
Hyperscale data centers are landing in El Paso and Santa Teresa. Twelve years commissioning that kind of building is the reason I can read the load numbers, and the reason I am not going to pretend they are small.
The briefing is public and every number in it is sourced. El Paso uses about 105 million gallons of water a day. The regional supply cushion, the part that is not already spoken for, is about 8.7 million gallons a day. Combined data center demand at full build-out is about 1.56 million gallons a day, which is 17.9 percent of that cushion. Not a rounding error, and not the end of the world either. A number, in public, that anyone can go argue with.
Power is tighter than water. El Paso Electric can make about 2,300 megawatts. The record peak this system has actually served is 2,173. That leaves roughly 127 megawatts of headroom on the worst afternoon of the year. Two of the proposed data centers alone are asking for about 250. You do not need a position on data centers to see that those two numbers do not fit together, and it is better for everyone that the question gets asked now rather than during a load-shed event in August.
So the work is not a protest. It is a draft. The repository carries a model city ordinance written out in full across eight articles, a crosswalk mapping it against the City's own draft framework so the two can be compared clause by clause, a one-page explainer for handouts, and an evidence record that lays out the water-balance math and the dispute timeline and indexes 68 public records behind it. Written at about an eighth-grade reading level, in English with a Spanish summary, and formatted to print, because the people this lands on are not reading a policy PDF on a laptop.
None of it is an official City of El Paso publication and none of it is legal advice. It is an independent briefing, released into the public domain, built to be checked and corrected. That is the only useful posture available to somebody who is not an elected official: put the math where people can see it, name every source, and be specific enough to be proven wrong.
Questions that come up
- How much water will El Paso's data centers use?
- About 1.56 million gallons a day at full build-out, against a regional supply cushion of roughly 8.7 million gallons a day. That is 17.9 percent of the cushion. El Paso as a whole uses about 105 million gallons a day. Every figure and its source is listed in the public briefing and in the evidence record behind it.
- Can the El Paso grid handle the proposed data centers?
- Not obviously. El Paso Electric can generate about 2,300 megawatts and the record peak actually served is 2,173, leaving roughly 127 megawatts of headroom. Two of the proposed facilities alone want about 250 megawatts. That gap is the central question the briefing puts in front of the City.
- What is Project Jupiter?
- A hyperscale data center development in the El Paso region. It is the subject of the evidence record in the briefing, which sets out the fact brief, the water-balance math, the timeline of the dispute and an index of 68 public records that anyone can pull for themselves.
- Is this an official City of El Paso document?
- No. It is an independent community briefing prepared by Celaya Solutions Research. The ordinance and the crosswalk are drafts, not legal advice, and anyone acting on them should consult counsel. The content is public domain and corrections are welcome.