By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
Maryland residents served by WSSC Water — the sprawling public utility covering Montgomery and Prince George’s counties — are increasingly raising alarms about unexplained spikes in their water bills. Some customers have reported charges in the thousands of dollars for usage that appears to exceed anything their households could produce. The utility’s own oversight office flagged deficiencies in how it handles billing disputes as recently as December 2025. Meanwhile, state and county officials are quietly grappling with a question that has received almost no public attention in the billing-complaint conversation:
What happens to WSSC’s water supply — and its ratepayers — when dozens of data centers start drawing from the same pipes that serve 1.9 million Maryland residents?
The answer, based on public records, county council presentations, and the cautionary example playing out across the Potomac in Northern Virginia, is that Maryland has not fully reckoned with the tradeoff it is making.
Bills, Disputes, and a System Breaking Down
High water bills have been a persistent source of friction between WSSC and its customers for years. Consumer complaints about inexplicably large charges have drawn television investigations, and billing disputes rank among the most common grievances filed against the utility. Montgomery County Council members pressed WSSC earlier this year to return with more detailed analyses of high-bill complaints and metrics on contractor performance — an acknowledgment that the issue remains unresolved.
In December 2025, WSSC’s own Inspector General released a report reviewing the utility’s processes for adjusting and correcting high bills. While the OIG found those processes to be generally consistent with Maryland law, it identified “deficiencies in the administration” of the program — meaning the system meant to protect customers from billing errors has known gaps.
When residents receive a bill they believe is wrong, WSSC’s standard guidance is to hire a plumber to check for underground leaks — at the customer’s expense. If no leak is found, the bill stands unless the customer successfully navigates a dispute process that few find intuitive. Disputed unpaid charges go before a Dispute Resolving Board. Disputed paid charges require a formal Refund Hearing. Customers who want to escalate further can file with the Maryland Consumer Affairs Division.
The structural problem behind some of these disputes is not necessarily WSSC malfeasance — it is that underground leaks are common, older infrastructure is failing, and a utility serving more than a thousand square miles of aging pipe has limited tools for real-time anomaly detection at the household level. WSSC is budgeting $320.4 million in its current capital plan for upgrades to aging water and sewer infrastructure, which is an implicit acknowledgment of the scale of the problem.
The documented pattern of system failures over the past 16 months makes the gap between that capital investment and current conditions impossible to ignore. In January 2025, frigid temperatures triggered a system-wide crisis: WSSC issued an essential-water-use-only order to all 1.9 million customers and was simultaneously managing 47 active breaks and leaks across the service area. The utility lifted the order only after asking residents to voluntarily reduce consumption enough to stabilize system pressure.
That scenario repeated — and worsened — in January 2026. WSSC issued another system-wide conservation order on January 27. By the time it was lifted on February 2, crews had responded to approximately 439 water main breaks and leaks since January 1 alone — nearly 190 of those occurring in the single week the order was in effect. At the peak, 48 breaks were active simultaneously. Crews were working around the clock in snow and ice conditions that made it difficult to visually locate break sites, and WSSC acknowledged the situation was straining its ability to keep storage tanks full and maintain required system pressure. The conservation order was issued, in the utility’s own words, to avoid a potential Boil Water Advisory and protect fire suppression capacity.
That same month, the Potomac River — WSSC’s primary source of water — was absorbing the impact of one of the worst sewage spills in recent American history. On January 19, 2026, a 72-inch section of the Potomac Interceptor, a major DC Water wastewater main running through Montgomery County near Cabin John, collapsed along the Clara Barton Parkway. Before a bypass system came online five days later, approximately 243 million gallons of untreated sewage had entered the Potomac. Maryland’s drinking water intakes are upstream of the collapse site and were not affected, and WSSC confirmed its water remained safe throughout. But the spill carried a direct financial consequence for WSSC ratepayers: under a longstanding multi-jurisdictional cost-sharing agreement, WSSC is responsible for 30.9 percent of repair costs on that segment of the interceptor — meaning Maryland customers will share in the estimated $20 million repair and environmental restoration bill, on top of the rate increases already approved.
In March 2026, a 30-inch sewer main collapsed in Germantown — a pipe that had already failed once in August 2024 and had been awaiting a replacement contract that stalled when the original repair plan proved inadequate. The sequence illustrates a dynamic that the $4.9 billion capital program is meant to address but has not yet resolved: known failing infrastructure is being repaired reactively, on timelines that infrastructure condition does not always accommodate.
As recently as May 19, a 20-inch water main broke on Bradley Boulevard in Bethesda, flooding the roadway and forcing closure. Repairs extended into the following morning’s rush hour.
The cumulative picture — two system-wide conservation orders in 13 months, 439 breaks in a single month, a major sewage spill adding to WSSC’s cost base, and a sewer main collapse in a pipe already flagged for replacement — is the infrastructure context into which Maryland is now considering adding industrial-scale water consumers. It is also coming from above — from a technology sector that has identified the Maryland suburbs as its next major expansion zone.
Data Centers Are Thirsty — and They Are Coming
A single large data center running evaporative cooling — the most common and cheapest system type — can consume between 4 and 5 million gallons of water per month. A medium-sized facility uses roughly 110 million gallons per year, equivalent to the annual consumption of approximately 1,000 households. These are not abstractions; they are the operational realities of facilities that draw from the same potable water supply that serves homes, schools, and hospitals.
Northern Virginia, directly across the state line, is already living with the consequences. Loudoun County — home to more than 200 data centers and widely known as the global epicenter of the industry — consumed around 900 million gallons of water in 2023 alone, a 63 percent increase from 2019. Altogether, Northern Virginia data centers consumed close to 2 billion gallons in 2023. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory projects those figures could double or quadruple by 2028 nationally, potentially reaching 74 billion gallons per year from the sector.
Maryland is following the same trajectory. A vacant Social Security building in Baltimore County, a former coal power plant site in Montgomery County, and the former Landover Mall property in Prince George’s County have all been identified as data center targets in the past year. A campus has been under development on a former industrial site in Frederick County. The proposed Brightseat Tech Park in Landover — a $5 billion, 820-megawatt project — drew a petition of more than 20,000 signatures from residents before Prince George’s County imposed a development moratorium in September 2025.
Crucially, the debate over those projects has focused almost entirely on electricity demand and grid strain. Water has been the quieter concern — until recently.
WSSC Briefed County Officials Last July. The Public Mostly Wasn’t Watching.
On July 9, 2025, WSSC Water’s Government Affairs Manager, Kenneth Simons, presented a briefing to Prince George’s County’s Qualified Data Center Task Force specifically on the intersection of data centers and water supply. The presentation, titled “Data Centers & Water: Understanding the Impact,” walked task force members through cooling system types, water sourcing options, and potential impacts on quality, infrastructure, and rates.
The utility’s official position on rates is reassuring on its surface: WSSC told the task force that data center development “would generally have no direct impact on increasing rates for other customers,” because the utility is required by law to charge uniform rates across customer classes and would treat a data center like any other large industrial customer.
But that framing sidesteps the more important question, which is infrastructure capacity. WSSC’s own presentation acknowledged that open-loop evaporative cooling systems — the type most data centers use because they are cheapest to operate — are highly water-intensive and draw from the same potable supply serving residential customers. It also acknowledged that large-scale data center development could require utility infrastructure upgrades, and that those needs would be evaluated through the permitting process.
Infrastructure upgrades cost money. That money comes from ratepayers. The legal requirement to charge uniform rates does not mean rates stay flat — it means everyone pays equally when they go up.
WSSC’s FY2026 budget, approved in May 2025, included a 9.5 percent revenue enhancement — a rate increase, in plain terms. Its FY2027 budget, approved this spring, added another 5 percent, amounting to roughly $4.92 more per month for a typical household. The utility’s six-year capital improvement program carries an estimated $4.9 billion price tag. That trajectory was set before any significant data center load was added to the system.
The Comparison Officials Are Citing — But Not Confronting
Prince George’s County’s data center task force explicitly studied Loudoun County as a model. The lesson cited most often in public proceedings has been economic: Loudoun generates significant tax revenue from its data center cluster. The lesson cited least often is the water one.
Loudoun Water, the county’s water authority, has been forced to rely heavily on potable water for data center cooling rather than reclaimed water, because reclaimed infrastructure has not kept pace with development. The utility has up to 5 million gallons of reclaimed water per day available during peak summer months — but that capacity has proven insufficient to meet demand from the county’s more than 200 data centers, many of which default to municipal potable supply.
WSSC’s own presentation identified reclaimed water as the preferred sustainable alternative but noted the barriers clearly: it requires additional treatment to meet Maryland Department of the Environment standards, dedicated pumping and piping infrastructure, and — critically — legislative action and Public Service Commission approval to establish a new rate tier. None of that infrastructure exists at scale in Prince George’s or Montgomery County today.
What exists today is the potable system that serves 1.9 million people.
A Policy Gap at the State Level
Maryland has no cohesive statewide policy regulating data center development. Local jurisdictions control approvals through zoning, which means individual counties are making decisions with statewide consequences — including consequences for shared water infrastructure — without a coordinating framework.
Prince George’s County’s moratorium expired at the end of 2025. Its task force released 14 policy recommendations in November, focused primarily on the permitting process and community engagement. Water demand management was addressed, but not as a binding constraint on development approvals. Montgomery County’s executive released policy recommendations in January 2026 largely mirroring approaches taken by neighboring jurisdictions.
At the General Assembly level, transparency legislation has been discussed that would centralize data center information at the state level. A bill targeting peak power curtailment has also been floated. Neither addresses water consumption directly.
Meanwhile, WSSC is presenting to task forces and preparing for rate hearings, and Maryland residents are filing billing complaints with the Montgomery County Consumer Affairs Division.
What Needs to Happen
The conversation Maryland is having about data centers is incomplete. Electricity demand has received sustained scrutiny because grid stress is visible and politically charged. Water demand has not received equivalent attention, even though the supply constraints are real, the infrastructure investment costs will fall on ratepayers, and the Northern Virginia precedent is directly applicable.
Several accountability questions remain unanswered in the public record:
WSSC has not published a public analysis of aggregate water demand projections under various data center development scenarios for its service area. The utility’s statement that data centers will not “directly” affect rates does not account for the indirect rate pressure created by infrastructure expansion costs. Prince George’s County’s task force recommendations do not include water consumption thresholds as a condition of data center approval. And the state has no mechanism for evaluating cumulative water demand impacts across county lines.
Maryland residents experiencing billing anomalies today — whether from aging infrastructure, meter errors, or underground leaks — are navigating a system that issued two system-wide conservation orders in 13 months, processed nearly 440 breaks in a single month, and is simultaneously absorbing the cost of a historic regional sewage spill. Adding industrial-scale water consumers to that system without a transparent accounting of what it will cost, and who will pay, is a policy choice. It should be made openly.
Residents who believe they have received an erroneous WSSC bill can initiate a dispute through the Dispute Resolving Board for unpaid charges or request a Refund Hearing for paid charges. Complaints can also be filed with the Maryland Consumer Affairs Division. More information is available at wsscwater.com.
Sources: WSSC Water Inspector General Report, “Customer Service High Bill Adjustments” (December 10, 2025); WSSC Water Presentation to Prince George’s County Qualified Data Center Task Force, “Data Centers & Water: Understanding the Impact” (July 9, 2025); WSSC Water FY2026 and FY2027 Budget Approvals; WSSC Water Essential Water Use Only advisories (January 2025; January–February 2026); WSSC Water, “Drinking Water for WSSC Water Customers Not Impacted by DC Water Sewer Main Collapse” (updated March 2026); Maryland Matters, “Army Corps joins Potomac River spill response” (February 2026); Potomac Conservancy, Potomac Interceptor spill updates (2026); EPA, “Potomac Interceptor Sewage Discharge” (updated May 2026); WSSC Water Nextdoor updates re: Germantown sewer main collapse (March 2026); WJLA/NBC Washington, Bradley Boulevard water main break coverage (May 2026); Prince George’s County Council Resolution CR-98-2025 (September 2025); Prince George’s County Qualified Data Center Task Force Final Recommendations (November 24, 2025); Environmental and Energy Study Institute, “Data Centers and Water Consumption” (June 2025); Bay Journal, “Maryland counties to data center industry: Slow down” (February 2026); Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, “2024 United States Data Center Energy Usage Report”; Streetcar Suburbs Publishing, “WSSC Water Customers Brace for Higher Utility Bills” (February 2026); WaterWorld, “WSSC Water approves $1.9 billion FY2027 budget” (2026); Maryland Matters, “In 2026, more data center regulations could be coming in Maryland” (January 2026).
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