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The Vertically Integrated Energy-AI Campus: Imperial Valley’s Unique Opportunity

The concept of vertical integration — controlling multiple stages of a production or supply chain within a single geographic and institutional framework — creates efficiencies and competitive advantages that distributed operations cannot replicate. What Imperial Valley has, if it allows the IVDC to proceed alongside the Lithium Valley development underway, is the beginnings of a vertically integrated clean energy and technology campus that does not exist at scale anywhere else in the United States.

Let’s trace what that looks like in practice.

Stage One: Geothermal Generation

The geothermal plants already operating in the Salton Sea region produce continuous, carbon-free electricity from the volcanic heat beneath the Valley floor. This generation is baseload — it runs at full capacity around the clock regardless of weather, season, or time of day. It does not require storage to be useful because it is always available. For an AI data center that needs to run multi-day training jobs without interruption, geothermal baseload is the ideal power source.

Stage Two: Lithium Extraction

The same geothermal brine that drives the power plants contains dissolved lithium in concentrations that make commercial extraction viable. CTR and its competitors are developing the direct lithium extraction technology that would pull lithium from the brine stream during the geothermal power generation process — producing both power and battery-grade lithium from the same resource, at the same facility, with minimal additional environmental footprint.

The lithium goes into batteries. Some of those batteries could go into the 862 MWh BESS at the IVDC. The BESS stores geothermal power during off-peak periods and discharges during peak demand — integrating the storage function with the generation and the compute functions within a coherent geographic and logistical network.

Stage Three: AI Compute

The IVDC is the anchor tenant for the compute function. It consumes the geothermal power directly. It benefits from the grid stability that the BESS provides. It creates the industrial demand base that makes additional geothermal investment economically viable — because a large, stable, long-term power customer makes the financial model for new geothermal development more attractive to investors.

In a mature version of this ecosystem, the data center’s power is locally generated, locally stored, and locally managed. The transmission losses that plague long-distance power delivery are eliminated. The grid instability that makes renewable power problematic for industrial users is addressed by on-site storage. The carbon footprint of AI compute — a growing concern for both technology companies and their customers — approaches zero.

What This Requires to Become Real

The vertically integrated energy-AI campus is not science fiction. Every component of it either exists already (geothermal plants, BESS technology, data center design) or is in active development (direct lithium extraction). The geography is correct. The resource base is real. The technology is proven.

What it requires is an institutional environment that allows large capital projects to proceed through their approved development timelines without being derailed by coordinated legal obstruction. The IVDC is the first major test of whether Imperial Valley can provide that environment. If it can, the ecosystem has a starting point. If it can’t, the components will find their way to other geographies where the institutional environment is more conducive to completion.

The opportunity is genuinely rare. The community’s ability to seize it depends on getting the IVDC right.

Geothermal Power and AI: Why Imperial Valley Is the Best Location for This Project in America

The AI infrastructure buildout underway globally has a fundamental problem: power. Training large AI models and running inference at scale requires enormous, continuous electricity consumption. The hyperscale facilities that host this compute — buildings the size of shopping malls filled with specialized processors — consume hundreds of megawatts each, and the pipeline for new facilities is constrained not by demand but by the availability of sufficient, reliable, affordable power in locations where large-scale development is feasible.

Imperial Valley solves this problem in ways that almost no other California location can match — and the combination of factors that make it the optimal location is not replicable by any competing site in the state.

Geothermal Baseload: The Power That Never Stops

The Salton Sea sits above one of the most significant geothermal resources in North America. The same volcanic heat that created the Salton Trough drives geothermal energy production at multiple plants already operating in the region. Geothermal power has a characteristic that solar and wind don’t: it runs continuously. No intermittency. No storage requirements for overnight operation. No weather dependency. A geothermal-powered data center runs at full capacity twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, on carbon-free electricity.

For AI compute, this matters critically. AI training runs require sustained high-power operation over periods of days to weeks. Solar power that disappears at sunset and wind power that varies with weather cannot support this load without either massive battery storage or backup fossil fuel generation. Geothermal is baseload — the data center runs when the AI training run requires it, not when the weather permits.

The Independent Grid: No Queue, No Constraints

IID’s independence from CAISO means that a developer connecting to IID’s system avoids the interconnection queue and transmission constraints that have delayed comparable projects in CAISO territory for years. The straightforward regulatory environment — one utility, manageable interconnection process, locally-controlled decision-making — is a competitive advantage that shortens project timelines significantly.

Compare this to the experience of data center developers trying to connect to CAISO’s grid in the Central Valley or Southern California. Interconnection studies take 18-36 months. Transmission upgrades required to support large new loads are allocated through complex cost-sharing arrangements. The regulatory environment is multi-layered. IID offers none of these complications — just a direct path to sufficient power in the quantities the project requires.

Land: Industrial-Zoned and Available

The project site is 75 acres of I-2 Heavy Industrial land — zoned, permitted by right, and available at a price point that no coastal California location can match. The land cost advantage for large-footprint industrial users in Imperial Valley versus comparable sites in the Bay Area or Southern California coastal communities is measured in orders of magnitude. A data center campus that would cost hundreds of millions of dollars per acre in Santa Clara can be built for a fraction of that cost per acre in Imperial County.

The combination of geothermal power, independent grid, industrial zoning, and land cost creates a value proposition for data center development that, when added together, is genuinely unique in the state. These are not arguments for why Imperial Valley is adequate for this project. They are arguments for why it is the optimal location.

The Economic Alignment

The optimal location for AI infrastructure in California happens to be in the highest-unemployment county in the state. That alignment — technical optimality meeting economic need — is not something that happens often. When it does, the institutions of the region are expected to recognize it and act accordingly. The county has. The courts have. The remaining obstacle is the coordinated campaign by officials and organizations whose interests don’t align with the community’s.

That campaign should not succeed. Imperial Valley’s combination of geothermal power, independent grid, industrial land, and economic need is a case that makes itself. The people blocking it are on the wrong side of both the law and the economic logic.