The Reality of Water Use and Grid Strain in the Midwest and HSDCs

 September 8, 2026

This is an ongoing effort to track and attempt to frame in some intelligible way the current state of water  supply and electric grid capacity with the onslaught of giant scale industrial users about to require immense increases in both.  It will be updated as needed.

Currently in the Central Plains - not exactly the Midwest that is an area about 400 miles east of the Central Plains but they share a lot of similarities including large scale agricultural operations operating throughout both regions along with large population centers - there is definitely a limit on available water and on available electricity for everyone and those limits are seemingly being obscured or deliberately misunderstood by proponents of AGI computing complexes.  These HSDCs are about to enormously increase the rate of use of water and electricity and the problem is for water, there is no human available way to increase available water, all the water that will ever be available is either in the Missouri River system or in what is left of the Ogalala Aquifier and that is it.  Rainfall does add millions of gallons to available water in the region but the vast majority of that is absorbed into farm and rangeland, some of it does add into the Missouri River system, but virtually none of it due to current human use makes it down to resupply the Aquifier, so I am not going to reference rainfall as part of the equation.  You can also have severe drought years in the Central States which would zero out literally the addition of rainfall so I am just not going to count it.  For Electricity, humans can make more but there are two challenges, one is what are you using to make electricity with.  Nuclear and Solar are by far the most sustainable long term energy sources and both work very well in the Central Plains.  Natural Gas and Coal work anywhere but I caution against the trend of going all in on Natural Gas because that will cause a bottleneck of demand vs  available supply which still results in costs going much higher.  Per kilowatt hour, solar is now the cheapest way to make large scale electricity and it installs faster than any other type of powerplant.  To be clear Nuclear is NOT the cheapest at all it is the most expensive way to make a kilowatt hour of power, but it is extremely stable and can be built out to make enormous amounts of power that works 24/7.  This is not a deep dive into power generation methods so I'm going to leave that there for now, the focus here is on how to get ahead and stay ahead, if possible, of the impending overuse about to be caused by HSDCs.