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The 950,000-Square-Foot Question: What a Hyperscale Data Center Actually Looks Like

Discussions about the Imperial Valley Data Center often involve statistics without context. 950,000 square feet. 330 megawatts. 862 megawatt-hours. 75 acres. These are large numbers, and they are cited by both supporters and opponents in ways that often leave the listener without a frame of reference for what they actually mean in practice.

Here is that context, starting with the building itself.

The Physical Scale

950,000 square feet is roughly the floor area of six large Costco warehouses placed end-to-end. It is a large industrial building — the kind of structure that is unremarkable in the context of I-2 Heavy Industrial zoning, which is designed to accommodate exactly this kind of large-footprint industrial use. The site is 75 acres, which provides substantial setback and operational area around the primary structure.

The building is, fundamentally, an industrial facility. It houses rows of computer servers in temperature-controlled halls, along with the cooling, power distribution, and support infrastructure those servers require. From the outside, a hyperscale data center looks like a very large warehouse with more visible mechanical equipment on the roof. It does not look like a power plant, a chemical facility, or a manufacturing operation. It generates no smoke, no chemical waste, no industrial byproducts beyond heat — which the cooling system manages.

The Power Infrastructure

330 megawatts is a large power load. For context: a typical residential household in California uses approximately 6-7 kilowatts of peak demand. 330 megawatts is the equivalent of roughly 47,000 homes. That number sounds alarming out of context. In context, it is a large industrial customer on an IID grid that has existing industrial loads and the generation capacity to serve them.

The key distinction is that the IVDC includes a dedicated 330-megawatt substation — infrastructure the developer builds and pays for — that connects directly to IID’s transmission network without burdening the existing distribution infrastructure that residential customers use. The data center is not drawing power through the same lines that serve homes in El Centro. It is a direct industrial connection at the transmission level.

The 862 MWh BESS is the other crucial context. This battery system means the facility does not draw 330 megawatts continuously from the grid. It draws power during off-peak hours to charge the batteries, then runs on battery storage during peak demand. The actual grid impact profile is a large but manageable off-peak load, not a continuous 330-megawatt demand spike.

The Water System

The cooling system for a facility of this size requires substantial water volumes. In a conventional water-cooled data center, this would mean significant potable water consumption — the 750,000-gallon figure that the opposition cites. The IVDC’s design avoids this entirely by using recycled municipal wastewater in a closed-loop system. The water is not drawn from the Colorado River or from potable supplies. It is treated effluent that municipal plants currently manage as a disposal challenge.

Physically, this means purple-pipe infrastructure running from municipal treatment facilities to the data center site — the same kind of reclaimed water distribution infrastructure that irrigation systems and industrial parks across California already use. The water goes into the cooling system, cycles through the facility, and the excess returns to the treatment cycle rather than being consumed or discharged as waste.

What the Facility Is Not

The IVDC is not a power generation facility. It does not produce electricity; it consumes it. It is not a chemical processing facility. It handles no hazardous materials beyond the standard industrial chemicals used in cooling systems. It is not an extraction operation. It does not mine, drill, or excavate. It is not a manufacturing plant. It produces no physical product.

It is a large industrial building that houses computer servers and the infrastructure to power and cool them. In the context of I-2 Heavy Industrial zoning — designed for exactly this class of industrial use — the IVDC is the intended occupant of the land it sits on. The scale of the numbers involved is real, but the nature of the use is precisely what the zoning framework was designed to accommodate.

862 Megawatt-Hours: How the IVDC’s Battery System Stabilizes the IID Grid

The argument that the Imperial Valley Data Center will crash the IID grid and spike electricity rates is built on a fundamental misrepresentation of what the project actually includes. It describes a data center that draws 330 megawatts of power directly from the grid, continuously, creating a demand spike that destabilizes the system and forces rate increases to cover the cost. This description is incomplete in a way that inverts the project’s actual impact.

The IVDC includes an 862 megawatt-hour Battery Energy Storage System — the BESS. This is not an optional add-on or a future phase. It is a core component of the project’s energy architecture. And it changes the grid impact calculation entirely.

How the BESS Changes the Math

A battery storage system of this scale allows the data center to decouple its instantaneous power draw from its actual demand on the generation and transmission infrastructure. During off-peak hours — nights, weekends, periods of low regional demand — the data center charges its battery bank, drawing power when the grid has excess capacity and generation costs are at their lowest. During peak demand periods, the facility runs on battery reserves, drawing little or nothing from the grid at exactly the moment when grid stress is highest.

For IID, this is not neutral. It is actively beneficial. IID’s grid faces the same demand pattern as every utility: a residential and commercial peak in the afternoon when air conditioning loads are highest, and a trough at night when most users are asleep or inactive. A large industrial customer that charges during the trough and discharges during the peak is performing a grid stabilization function — absorbing excess off-peak generation and reducing peak demand. That function has real economic value.

Utilities pay for this service when they procure it from independent storage operators. The IVDC provides it as a byproduct of its own operational efficiency.

What the Critics Leave Out

The narrative that the IVDC will “crash the grid” requires ignoring the 862 MWh BESS entirely. It also requires ignoring the dedicated 330-megawatt substation that the developer is building at its own cost — infrastructure that serves the data center without burdening IID’s existing transmission network.

A project that builds its own substation and includes a grid-scale battery storage system is not straining the grid. It is adding infrastructure capacity to the grid at private expense. The ratepayers who benefit from that added capacity are not being asked to fund it. The developer absorbs the capital cost.

The critics who claim the project will destabilize the grid either have not read the technical specifications, or they have read them and are choosing not to discuss them. In either case, the claim does not hold up under scrutiny, and the scrutiny should be applied publicly.

The Renewable Energy Alignment

Imperial Valley’s geothermal and solar resources produce power on schedules that don’t always match demand. Geothermal is baseload — it produces continuously, which is valuable but creates surplus during low-demand periods. Solar is peak — it produces during daylight hours that partly align with air conditioning demand but create morning and evening ramp challenges as clouds and sunset shift the supply.

A large battery storage customer that absorbs surplus generation during off-peak and low-price periods and discharges during high-demand periods is a natural complement to IID’s renewable portfolio. The IVDC’s BESS is essentially a grid-scale storage asset that happens to be funded by a private industrial customer rather than by ratepayers.

The suggestion that this represents a grid threat — rather than a grid asset — is not an analysis of the project’s technical specifications. It is a political argument dressed up in technical language. The IID board members who are elected to manage the utility on behalf of its ratepayers should be evaluating the BESS on its engineering merits, not on the basis of talking points generated by the project’s opponents.