Gov. Henry McMaster and his commerce secretary were among the chief cheerleaders on Thursday morning when Google broke ground on two new water-guzzling data centers in Dorchester County and an expansion of its Berkeley County facility that consumed more than 2 million gallons a day in 2023.
By afternoon, the leading edge of Hurricane Helene began the storm system’s two-day march through the center of South Carolina, prompting flood warnings across the state.
And of course excess water is always an issue on peninsular Charleston, where sunny-day flooding has become commonplace.
Given all that, it might seem odd to embark on a discussion about how to allocate South Carolina’s limited water resources.
But those hurricanes don’t come along every day, and they dump so much rain in such a short period of time that much of that water gets swept quickly out to sea, without replenishing our groundwater supplies, and sometimes without even making the contribution it would to our lakes and rivers if it were delivered over a longer period.
As for the water that inundates the peninsula and other low-lying coastal areas, that’s rarely the kind of water we need to meet our human and industrial needs.
And those needs are growing like mad, as South Carolina’s population swells and industry booms, and those unquenchable data centers flock to a state where industrial recruiters roll out the red carpet and local officials throw tax breaks at them in ways their employment numbers could never justify. (Google has a goal of eventually replenishing more water than it uses, but that hasn't happened yet.)
All this on top of the industrial farmers to whom state regulators have given carte blanche to use as much of our surface water as they want, no questions asked. They're not even asked how much their consumption hurts other farmers, public water utilities, industry and people who just want to enjoy our lakes and rivers.
So absolutely, as Mr. McMaster put it two days before he cheered on the thirsty new data centers, while “South Carolina has been richly blessed with abundant water resources,” the increasing demands "driven by historic economic development and a booming population” do indeed mean that “we must take action now to ensure these resources are managed in the best interests of all South Carolinians."
We just need to make sure we take the right actions.
This spring, the Legislature created a Surface Water Study Committee that’s supposed to balance environmental and economic considerations and issue a report by March 1 recommending “additions or changes to current law to ensure sustainable surface water withdrawal practices and procedures.” Mr. McMaster's executive order layers a study group with a larger mandate atop that one because, as it notes, surface and ground water are “inextricably connected and must be considered together when defining state water policy.”
There’s no question about that; there also should be no question that we need to tighten up our surface water withdrawal rules for industrial farmers — or that the Legislature has refused, year after year, to do that. Mr. McMaster needs to ensure that his new commission doesn’t slow down or complicate any effort to finally make that happen. He needs to ensure as well that his commission doesn’t take a cue from his exuberance and give a pass to data centers, whose excessive use of water is matched only by their excessive use of electricity.
We absolutely need to ensure that essential sectors of our economy — electric and water utilities, farmers who grow food and industries that power our economy — have enough water. But we can’t afford to give a double-dip of our increasingly scarce water resources to businesses that don’t provide a significant boost to our economy through significant numbers of good-paying jobs, and that could just as easily locate elsewhere without hurting us. We certainly don’t need to keep paying such companies to open shop in our state.
Click here for more opinion content from The Post and Courier.
