waterbycounty

Data centers and water

Data Center Water Use in Waukesha County, WI

Waukesha County, Wisconsin has 1 mapped data center facility, including WE Energies, carrying about 9 MW of estimated power load.

WE Energies

Water pressure for new demandHow hard a large new water user, like a data center, would press on this county's water. It blends recent drinking-water compliance, drought, and existing industrial demand. Higher pressure means new demand competes harder with current uses. It is not a judgment about whether one should be built.

13/ 100

Low water pressure

Waukesha County has no health violations in the last 5 years, abnormally dry conditions, moderate existing industrial water demand.

Mapped facilities
1
EPA + OpenStreetMap layers
Estimated power load
9 MW
IM3 Atlas capacity estimate
Permitted discharge
Not reported
Clean Water Act permit fields
DCWSI national rank
#2,473
of 318 scored counties

The operators

How many data centers are in Waukesha County?

1 facility is mapped to Waukesha County, Wisconsin across the EPA and OpenStreetMap layers, run by operators including WE Energies. Counts reflect mapped footprint, not an operator's total fleet.

  • Pewaukee Data Center

    WE Energies · Waukesha, WI

    OpenStreetMap

Supply versus demand

How much water do Waukesha County data centers use?

Exact facility water draw is rarely public. As a screening proxy we compare the Clean Water Act permitted discharge mapped to these facilities against the county's entire industrial water baseline from the USGS 2020 series.

No Clean Water Act permitted discharge is reported for the mapped facilities in Waukesha County. The figures below show the county's industrial water baseline for context.

Facility discharge vs county industrial water
Mapped facility discharge
Not reported
County industrial baseline
20.1 Mgal/day

Model a build

Can Waukesha County support more data centers?

On the water-pressure scale, Waukesha County sits at 13, below the national median, so new large-load demand has more slack here than in most counties. Size a hypothetical build to see the daily draw against the county industrial baseline.

Data Center Water Budget Calculator

Estimate daily water use for a hypothetical facility in Waukesha County.

1 MW1,000 MW
40%100%
799K gallons/dayLow Impact

Your facility would use 4.0% of this county's existing industrial water baseline — well within sustainable range.

4.0% of county industrial baseline19.27 Mgal/day remaining headroom

Based on USGS 2020 water-use data and EPA-standard cooling intensity constants. Not a substitute for site-specific water rights analysis.

In context

How does Waukesha County compare nationally?

DCWSI build-out rank
#2,473
of 318 counties with a stress score
Water pressure vs median
-6
national median is 19 of 100
Share of mapped load
0.0%
of 166.02 GW mapped nationally

Waukesha County is one of 330 US counties with mapped data centers. See the full ranking and the interactive map in the national atlas.

Facility data combines EPA ECHO, EPA Clean Water Act permits, OpenStreetMap, and the IM3 Open Source Data Center Atlas (DOE/PNNL), geocoded to county FIPS. Capacity and water baselines come from IM3 and USGS 2020 water-use data. These are county-level screening figures, not a facility-level water-use audit. Read the full methodology.

By Evan Brooks, Data EditorPublished Reviewed by Evan Brooks, Data Editor