The Salton Sea Restoration Nobody Is Talking About
The Salton Sea restoration debate has produced dozens of plans, hundreds of millions of dollars in studies and preliminary projects, and very little additional water in the lake. The fundamental challenge is hydraulic: the Sea needs freshwater inflows to offset evaporation and the loss of agricultural drainage water that historically sustained it, and finding those inflows in a region under severe water allocation pressure is genuinely difficult.
The IVDC’s recycled wastewater plan was not a Salton Sea restoration project. It was a data center cooling system. But as a byproduct of that cooling system — treated municipal wastewater running through an upgraded treatment process, with excess clean water released from the system — it would have contributed a consistent freshwater inflow to a lake that can use every gallon it can get.
That contribution was blocked by the City of Imperial’s alleged interference with the will-serve agreement. The people who blocked it are also the people arguing that the data center is an environmental threat to the region. That contradiction requires examination.
The State of the Sea
The Salton Sea’s surface elevation has dropped significantly in recent decades. As the lake recedes, it exposes ancient lakebed sediments that have accumulated decades of agricultural runoff — selenium, arsenic, pesticide residues — in concentrations that are benign when wet and toxic when airborne. The PM10 and PM2.5 dust that blows off the exposed playa has measurable health consequences for the communities downwind, including elevated rates of asthma and respiratory disease in populations that have few resources to mitigate the exposure.
The state’s official Salton Sea Management Program has produced a series of projects — mostly habitat wetlands at the lake’s perimeter — that serve real ecological functions but do not address the fundamental water volume problem. The lake continues to lose more water than these projects return.
Any credible Salton Sea strategy has to grapple with the inflow problem. Every additional gallon of freshwater delivered to the lake’s catchment area matters — not because any single source will reverse the trend, but because the cumulative effect of multiple sources can slow the rate of decline while longer-term solutions are developed.
What the IVDC’s Water Plan Would Have Contributed
The data center’s recycled water system would have run at industrial scale — the volumes needed to cool a 330-megawatt data center campus are substantial. The treated effluent from upgraded El Centro and Imperial wastewater plants, less what the cooling system consumed, would have been a consistent and reliable freshwater contribution to the regional water system.
Consistent and reliable are key words in the Salton Sea context. The lake’s current inflow contributions are seasonal, variable, and declining. A large industrial customer with a constant cooling load provides a constant, predictable water demand that sustains the treatment infrastructure and the water flow even when agricultural drainage is reduced or seasonal patterns shift.
The developer offered to fund the municipal infrastructure upgrades needed to make this work. He was not asking the state, the county, or the cities to bear the capital cost. He was offering to pay it in exchange for a water supply agreement. The cities would have received upgraded treatment infrastructure they needed anyway. The data center would have received its cooling supply. The Salton Sea would have received additional inflows.
The City of Imperial allegedly pressured El Centro to walk away from that arrangement. The people of the Valley — and the people who care about the Salton Sea — deserve a full public accounting of why.
