In a lawsuit filed Monday in a Travis County court, the Public Utility Commission of Texas argued that two of the most mundane geographic facts a government could hold — the county where a data center operates and the regional water planning zone around it — are too sensitive for the public to see.
The commission’s lawsuit pits it directly against Attorney General Ken Paxton’s Open Records Division, which has already issued two rulings concluding that the PUC failed to demonstrate those details meet the legal standard for withholding under the Texas Homeland Security Act. The Public Utility Commission is asking the court to overrule both decisions. The agency responsible for regulating the state’s electric utilities, in other words, is suing the state’s top law officer to keep parts of its own survey results confidential.
The fight centers on data the commission gathered as part of a mandatory energy and water use survey. Texas lawmakers directed the PUC in 2025 to collect operational details from data centers and virtual currency mining facilities across the state — electricity demand, actual consumption, projected peak loads, cooling technology, water usage, and the infrastructure connecting each site to the grid — because rapid AI and cryptocurrency expansion had made it difficult for planners to anticipate the cumulative strain on Texas’s power system and water supply…