Chicagoland data center boom raises new questions about Lake Michigan water use

CHICAGO - Rising utility bills and increased noise aren’t the only concerns surrounding data centers. They’re also making headlines over fears they could contribute to lower water levels in Lake Michigan.

As our series on data centers across Chicagoland continues, FOX Chicago’s Bret Buganski takes a closer look to get to the bottom of those concerns.

What they're saying:

"I'm worried about Lake Michigan as it is, because I was looking at a news article about the ice pack in Lake Michigan and how it was statistically very low," said Jeremy Brzycki.

Brzycki, his wife Emily and their two sons live in Joliet. He's worried about what the future looks like for this Great Lake — not just because of climate change but because of the data center building boom, too.

"And with as many new data centers as we're talking about bringing into Illinois and Wisconsin and Indiana and Michigan, what's gonna happen to that water source that we take for granted?" Brzycki said.

In Joliet, the aquifer that’s been the city's primary water source for years will soon no longer be sustainable for its residents. By 2030, Joliet will switch to Lake Michigan water.

It is one of six far south suburbs that recently formed the Grand Prairie Water Commission to purchase treated lake water from the city of Chicago.

The plan is to deliver it to residents through a 62-mile water transmission line. That line starts at the Southwest Pumping Station in Chicago's Durkin Park. It consists of new pipes and some that have just been updated.

The cost: $1.5 billion.

"So I'll be just very clear, data center water use is highly unlikely to affect the level of Lake Michigan," said Joel Brammeier.

Brammeier is the president and CEO of the Alliance for the Great Lakes.

"The real concern here in Illinois is the fact that we have this limit on how much water we're allowed to use from Lake Michigan. So the limit in this case isn't being made by the level of Lake Michigan, it's being made by the fact that Illinois has to keep itself under this limit that's been imposed by the Supreme Court," he said.

Brammeier is talking about the Lake Michigan Diversion Consent Decree. It’s a 1967 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that regulates how much water the state of Illinois can divert from the Lake Michigan Basin on a daily basis into the Mississippi River Basin.

Dig deeper:

The history behind that ruling goes back even further.

"This all stems from the late 1800s, right around 1900. Chicago was putting its wastewater back directly into Chicago River, which then flowed out into Lake Michigan. There were serious health problems associated with that. And so, Chicago reversed the flow of the river and sent their water, built a canal and sent that water downstream. You know, eventually it goes to the Gulf of Mexico. There were legal battles over Chicago using this water and not putting it back," said Robert Hirschfeld, director of water policy at Prairie Rivers Network, a downstate environmental nonprofit organization that protects water and land resources.

Under this Supreme Court decree, Illinois is allowed to divert just over 2 billion gallons of water a day.

That may sound like a lot, but when you factor in multiple large-scale users at the same time, it can add up quickly.

"So data centers, farms, residential customers can all be located in the same place. And if they're all drawing from the same water supply, say groundwater or the same municipal supply, those uses can come into conflict with each other, right? And so if we don't plan smart for how we're gonna do this kind of development, you can actually start running into water shortages, even in places that are located in this Great Lakes region with this great abundance," Brammeier said.

Philip Nelson is the president of the Illinois Farm Bureau.

"Well, water usage in these data centers is big," he said.

According to Nelson, farmers across the state regularly ask about data centers whenever the bureau is on the road, with water being a big concern.

"Whether it's a million gallons a day, whether that's a closed loop system that recycles that. The one in Joliet is building a pipeline from the Great Lakes down, just because the concerns that we're hearing locally, this could have an impact on the aquifer where we all pull water off of. And what would that do if you site two or three of these big data centers? That's going to dip into that aquifer," he said.

Nelson is a fourth-generation grain and livestock farmer in Seneca, Illinois. He and his family grow corn and soybeans. They also raise cattle and a few hogs.

"I just think there's a lot of unanswered questions right now. The public hearings here locally whether it's Joliet, Minooka, Yorkville, they've had jam-packed crowds of citizens that are worried about these issues," Nelson said.

Big picture view:

According to the Alliance for the Great Lakes’ 2025 water use report, anywhere from 40% to 75% of people living in Great Lakes states rely on groundwater for their drinking water.

The report also points out that conflicts over groundwater, and concerns about overuse, are already happening across the region, with examples in states like Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Indiana.

And when groundwater is pumped faster than it can naturally recharge, it creates bigger problems.

Aquifers can’t replenish themselves quickly enough, which can lower water tables and require drilling deeper wells, driving up costs in the process.

And the price is more than just money. The Great Lakes Alliance's water use report mentions a new study that indicates some cities in the Great Lakes are sinking at the surface level.

Chicago, Columbus, Indianapolis and Detroit are subsiding at about 2 millimeters or more a year. That’s due to what is called compaction. It happens underground when the space once filled with groundwater collapses.

Over time, this sinking threatens public drinking water supplies along with buildings and roads.

"Right now, we're living within that allocation, which is great. We're being good stewards of that allocation," said Nora Beck.

Beck is a policy analyst with the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning. It’s the federal and state regional planning agency for northeastern Illinois, where part of their job is to keep an eye on how much water we are using.

"We see in our demand forecast that we're projecting overall water use to decline, but there's some real uncertainty with high water use industries, like data centers and others, as well as climate change," she said.

According to Beck, data centers and climate change are two big trends they need to keep an eye on so they can start to think about how to protect this water allocation and make sure the region stays within it.

To find out who's using this water now, FOX Chicago submitted a Freedom of Information request to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. The station found there are 19 municipalities that currently have intakes to Lake Michigan to withdraw water and redistribute it to 228 other cities and towns.

FOX Chicago asked Beck what she thinks the future of water use looks like.

"Well, we need to know a lot more information. I think that's critical, right? We need to know how much water our data centers are actually using and be able to incorporate that into our analysis. We also know that there's a lot of different technologies for cooling data centers, so I think that's something that we really wanna have a better handle on — which technologies actually use the most water, which facilities are using that technology, and we can go from there," she said.

Right now, data centers are not required to report how much water or electricity they use. They also don’t have to publicly disclose what kind of cooling or heating systems they are using.

How much water or electricity a data center needs can vary depending on how it gets power and how it cools its equipment.

FOX Chicago asked the Illinois DNR what happens if the daily diversion limit is exceeded and the Supreme Court decree is broken.

The department declined a request for an on-camera interview and would only provide responses via email.

The DNR said the department's Office of Water Resources' Lake Michigan Management Section "enforces" water allocation by requiring permits and monitoring compliance.

If the decree is broken, there are several disciplinary actions the DNR can take, including pursuing circuit court fines up to $10,000.

"Many of the communities that take that water in from Lake Michigan, they use it for their own customers, but then they also distribute it and sell it to other customers across northeastern Illinois. Recently, the city of Joliet struck a deal to purchase a little more than 50 million gallons per day of water from the city of Chicago," Brammeier said.

Local perspective:

Water diverted under the Lake Michigan Consent Decree falls into three main categories: domestic water supply, direct diversion and stormwater runoff.

In an email to FOX Chicago, the DNR explained that domestic water supply is used to serve communities and industries across Cook, Lake, DuPage, Kane and Will counties.

The department also broke down direct diversion into two subcategories: navigation and discretionary.

Diversion for navigation helps maintain safe water levels in canals, locks and dams, while discretionary diversion is used to improve water quality throughout the canal system.

The DNR also said any entity with a permit to receive a portion of Lake Michigan water can use it to supply customers within their service area, or sell it to another water system, as long as that system also has a permit.

Brammeier says sending Lake Michigan water to Joliet is a good example of how this system works in practice.

"So that's going to require the construction of a new pipeline. That water is going to be sent out to Joliet, and then Joliet is going to decide who it wants to sell that water to. Because again, all this is major infrastructure that has to be paid for. So now the question is, how much of that water is gonna get used for data centers, right? Will Joliet carve off a percentage for industrial cooling? Will some of its customers, the smaller cities that it sells to, use that for commercial cooling as well? How much of this water supply is gonna be committed to those kinds of uses? How much is gonna be committed to residential customers? So, right now, you can have this image that there's basically unlimited water, but that's not reality," Brammeier said.

FOX Chicago asked Joliet's Public Utilities Department how they plan to divide up their Lake Michigan water allocation when they start receiving it in 2030.

In an email, the department said it expects just over 126,000 gallons a day to be allocated to its 795-acre data center campus. That’s about 1% of the city’s 15.6 million gallons of daily water allotment.

The department also said, "The Joliet Technology Center will utilize closed loop cooling methods exclusively," and "The total water consumption is projected to be considerably less than residential and manufacturing uses of a similar size."

"There are some rules and laws around water use and water reporting for that Lake Michigan diversion. But for the rest of the state that doesn't rely on Lake Michigan, there really aren't these rules. So it's kind of open season on the resource," Hirschfeld said.

He added, "We have no system, no market, nothing that can allocate water to the highest and best use, right? It's just basically anyone, like I said, anyone can tap into a water source and withdraw. And until there's a conflict, then some other landowner would have to go to court and sue and say, well, you're impacting my right to use water, which is time consuming and very expensive. And it's not an efficient way to allocate precious resources."

For water that is not part of the Lake Michigan Consent Decree, Hirschfeld says Illinois defers to a law from another country and another century.

"So Illinois relies on English common law, which says that you have the right to reasonably use water. So whether that's surface water or groundwater, like an aquifer, the right to use water runs with the land. And so a landowner can put in a pipe or a well and withdraw as much water as they want, so long as they're not impeding another landowner's right to reasonably use water," Hirschfeld said.

What's next:

With water laws this outdated, you’d think there’d be a surge of new rules as the data center boom picks up. FOX Chicago found at least two bills addressing the issue were introduced this session.

"To me, an obvious first step is to enforce the reporting requirement that already exists. However, we want to manage or govern water, right? Whether it's a permitting system or whatever it might be, we're not going to be able to do that if we don't know who's using how much water. And the state already requires that we report, but they just don't enforce it," Hirschfeld said.

He added, "You are supposed to report to the Illinois State Water Survey as part of their Illinois Water Inventory Program. It's called IWIP. But the Illinois Water Survey has no enforcement authority."

Meanwhile, the Illinois Farm Bureau has been keeping an eye on several bills at both the state and federal levels, hoping to put some guardrails in place to protect farmland as data centers expand.

Late last year, the group also put together its own guidelines for how data center projects should move forward in rural areas — giving county farm bureaus something to lean on when these proposals come up locally.

"You know, they're not making any more land, and I keep saying that, that we need to be good stewards of that land and how we use it and what we develop it into," Nelson said. "Some of the data centers that are being sited around here, some of them are really good farmland. Not all of them, but some of it. So, eventually that limits the use of production of agriculture commodities when you concrete these things over and build buildings. So, at some point in time it'll have an impact on that industry."

Until the laws change, that makes planning and preparing for future water usage so important.

"If it comes down to a conflict of municipalities and residents versus data centers, data centers are going to win. They have a lot more pull than we do. They have more money than we have," Brzycki said. "There's a way to do this that doesn't require us to make these really difficult, controversial decisions if we can get smarter about how we calculate that water use up front. We're smarter about where we site these facilities and we focus on making it a win for the communities there and a win for the Great Lakes."

What you can do:

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