Lithium Valley, the Data Center, and the Economic Future Imperial Valley Keeps Almost Capturing
The economic potential of Imperial Valley has been recognized and discussed for years. The geothermal resources. The lithium in the Salton Sea brine. The solar irradiance. The land. The independent grid. Academic papers have been written, government reports commissioned, investment conferences held. The Valley is consistently described as one of the most significant untapped economic development opportunities in the American West.
And yet the transformation keeps not quite arriving. CTR is fighting through CEQA challenges. The IVDC is fighting through litigation. Other projects in the pipeline face similar obstacles. The gap between the Valley’s recognized potential and its realized economic development is large and persistent.
That gap has a cause. It is not geological, it is not infrastructural, and it is not financial. It is political and institutional. The same patterns that are documented in the IVDC fight — organized CEQA obstruction, coordinated opposition by officials and organizations with competing interests, manufactured legal exposure — appear across multiple projects in the region. The Valley keeps almost capturing its economic future because certain actors benefit from the capture never completing.
What a Realized Lithium Valley Requires
Lithium Valley — the geothermal lithium extraction opportunity in the Salton Sea region — is a national strategic priority. Domestic lithium supply for electric vehicle batteries and grid storage is a critical minerals challenge that affects the United States’ ability to transition its energy system and reduce dependence on Chinese supply chains. Imperial Valley is the most significant domestic opportunity for addressing that challenge.
Realizing that opportunity requires multiple large projects getting built in a reasonable timeframe. CTR and its competitors have invested years and significant capital in development. They have navigated federal, state, and local approval processes. They are capable of building these projects. What they need is an institutional environment that allows permitted projects to proceed — without the greenmail demands, the coordinated CEQA campaigns, and the jurisdictional overreach that have characterized the Imperial Valley development environment.
The IVDC fight is connected to the Lithium Valley fight because the same institutional environment affects both. A region that demonstrates — through the IVDC outcome — that permitted projects can be completed despite organized obstruction sends a different signal to every Lithium Valley developer than a region that demonstrates the opposite.
The Data Center as Infrastructure for Everything Else
The IVDC is not just a data center. It is demand-side infrastructure for the energy economy that the Valley is trying to build. A 330-megawatt industrial customer for IID creates the load that justifies additional generation investment. Additional generation investment makes more geothermal projects financially viable. More geothermal projects bring more lithium extraction. Lithium extraction brings battery manufacturing interest. Battery manufacturing brings the entire value chain of the clean energy transition to a region that has the resources to anchor it.
None of this happens if the first major step — a hyperscale data center on industrial land with access to geothermal power — gets blocked by organized obstruction after clearing every legal hurdle. The IVDC is the anchor tenant of an economic ecosystem that doesn’t exist yet but could. The fight over whether it gets built is a fight over whether that ecosystem ever starts to form.
Imperial Valley has been on the verge of transformation for too long. The people who live there are entitled to see that transformation actually happen, and to hold accountable the actors who have made it their business to prevent it.
