Erin Brockovich posted something this week that stopped my scroll. North Carolina residents, she wrote, are watching major projects get forced on their communities again — first it was Duke Energy’s coal ash, and now it’s a surge of AI data centers driving electricity demand through the roof, with more coal burned to feed them. Her ask was simple: transparency and real oversight.
You know her name from chromium-6 — it’s pinned near the top of my article library for a reason. But forget the famous name for a minute. I spent 40 years in the water business, so I did what I always do: I checked her claim against the paper. Here’s what holds up, and what it means for anybody’s water — including yours.
The old bill: coal ash
On February 2, 2014, a stormwater pipe ruptured under a coal ash pond at Duke Energy’s retired Dan River plant in Eden, North Carolina. About 39,000 tons of ash and up to 27 million gallons of ash water poured into the Dan River and coated roughly 70 miles of it gray. Duke pleaded guilty to federal Clean Water Act crimes in 2015 and paid $102 million in fines and restitution.
That spill forced the reckoning. Duke had 14 coal plant sites in North Carolina holding 32 ash basins — ponds of ash slurry sitting in the ground, many unlined, next to rivers and over groundwater. Coal ash isn’t inert dirt. It’s what’s left when you burn coal, concentrated: arsenic, hexavalent chromium, mercury, lead, selenium, boron. State monitoring around these sites has documented those chemicals moving into groundwater for years.
On December 31, 2019, Duke settled with the state and community groups, and a court approved the consent order in February 2020: dig up more than 80 million tons of ash at the remaining sites and move it into lined, dry landfills — the largest coal ash cleanup in American history, about 124 million tons statewide when you count the sites already underway. That digging is still going on and will run for years. The communities Erin is talking about have been living next to this for a decade. They’ve earned their suspicion of the next big project.
The new load: data centers
So is she right that data centers are driving the new demand? Check Duke’s own numbers. In Duke Energy’s 2025 load forecast, total electricity demand across its two Carolina systems is projected to grow between 16% and nearly 60% through 2040 — and data centers account for roughly 80% of that projected growth. Duke says it’s tracking about 37 gigawatts of proposed data center projects in the Carolinas. One gigawatt is roughly a nuclear reactor’s worth of output. After decades of nearly flat demand, that’s not growth — that’s a wave.
The water math nobody puts on the brochure
Here’s the part that lands in my world. A typical data center drinks a few hundred thousand gallons of water a day, mostly to cool the servers. The biggest campuses use millions of gallons a day — Google’s Council Bluffs, Iowa campus has averaged about 2.8 million gallons daily. And that’s just the water on site.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s 2024 report for the U.S. Department of Energy put hard numbers on it: in 2023, American data centers directly consumed about 17.4 billion gallons of water for cooling — and the water consumed generating their electricity came to roughly 211 billion gallons, about twelve times more. Every kilowatt-hour has a water shadow, because most power plants cool themselves with water too.
Now the honest scale check, because I don’t do scare numbers: nationally, 17 billion gallons a year is small next to power generation’s overall water use. Spread across the whole country, data centers are not draining America. But water is never national — it’s local. One campus pulling a small city’s worth of water out of one town’s system, in one watershed, is a real thing for the people on that water. Ask Person County.
A year of not being told
In the fall of 2024, Microsoft bought the 1,350-acre Mega Park site in Person County, North Carolina, for about $27 million. For more than a year, neither the company nor the county would say what it was for — the deal was wrapped in non-disclosure agreements, which everyone involved described as standard practice. Residents asked anyway. At a community meeting in Roxboro in November 2025, neighbors voiced their frustration to a room where the honest answer was still “we can’t tell you.” It wasn’t until February 24, 2026 — after reporters kept asking — that Microsoft and the county confirmed the site would become a data center.
To Microsoft’s credit, its promises since then are the right ones: pay its own way so the project doesn’t raise electricity prices, minimize water use, and replenish more water than it consumes. Other North Carolina communities aren’t waiting to find out — Chatham County put a one-year moratorium on new data center permitting in February 2026, and other local governments have paused to write rules first. That’s not anti-technology. That’s a town insisting on reading the contract before signing it.
The deal that answers Erin’s question — partly
This month, the fight produced something real. On October 7, 2026, Duke Energy announced a settlement with the North Carolina Public Staff — the agency that represents utility customers — joined by Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, along with the U.S. Department of Defense and an industrial customers’ group. The terms: new large customers of 50 megawatts or more must pay upfront, nonrefundable, for the grid facilities built just for them; post deposits and guarantees for shared upgrades like transmission lines; take service on a special High Load Factor rate schedule; and pay minimum monthly bills of at least 75% of the demand they projected — so if a data center promises big and builds small, it still pays for what it said it would use. Duke’s North Carolina president put it plainly: “Data centers will pay upfront for all costs to connect to the grid.”
Two honest caveats. First, the settlement still needs approval from the North Carolina Utilities Commission — a decision is expected by mid-November — so as of today it’s a signed deal, not yet the law of the land. Second, a rate schedule settles the power bill. It doesn’t by itself answer the water questions: how much, from which river or aquifer, and what happens to the town’s supply in a drought year. Those get decided project by project, in county hearings most people never hear about until the land is already bought.
What I’d ask if one came to my town
Erin’s post wasn’t really about North Carolina. It’s about a pattern, and New Jersey is not exempt from it — the same proposals are landing here. So if a data center gets proposed near you, here are the questions worth asking early, in public, while they’re still questions:
- How much water will it use on its hottest day, and where does that water come from?
- Is the cooling closed-loop, or does the water evaporate into the sky?
- Who pays for the power and water upgrades if the project shrinks or walks away?
- Why is any of it under non-disclosure? A town can keep a secret’s timing without keeping its own residents in the dark for a year.
None of that is anti-data-center. I use the internet too. It’s the same rule I give every homeowner about their own tap: don’t take anybody’s word for what’s in your water or what it’s going to cost you. Test it, read the report, and make them show you the numbers — before the concrete is poured, not after.
The coal ash took a disaster, a guilty plea, and a decade of fighting to get dug up. The whole point of asking questions now is not needing that again.
— Steve Bella, iPhilter
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