The opposition’s most emotionally effective argument against the Imperial Valley Data Center is also its most factually misleading one: that the project will consume 750,000 gallons of potable water per day, draining a Colorado River system already under severe allocation pressure.
The claim is built on a real number — a large data center cooling system can indeed require hundreds of thousands of gallons of water per day. But the claim omits the most important fact about the IVDC’s design: the project does not plan to use potable water. It plans to use recycled wastewater from the municipal treatment plants in El Centro and Imperial — what the water industry calls “purple pipe” water, distinguished from potable water by the color-coded infrastructure that carries it.
These are not compatible claims. Either the project uses potable water from the Colorado River, or it uses recycled municipal wastewater. The project’s engineering design documents, the developer’s public statements, and the proposed will-serve agreements with El Centro and Imperial all confirm: it uses recycled wastewater. The Colorado River is not involved.
What Purple Pipe Water Is
Municipal wastewater treatment plants process sewage and produce treated effluent — water that has been cleaned to secondary or tertiary treatment standards and is suitable for industrial, agricultural, and environmental applications. California has invested billions of dollars in recycled water infrastructure specifically to make this treated effluent available as a water resource, reducing dependence on potable supplies for uses that don’t require drinking-water quality.
Data center cooling is an ideal application for recycled water. The cooling towers require large volumes of water, but the water quality requirements are industrial, not potable. Using recycled effluent for cooling is not a compromise — it is the intended design of a recycled water system. The IVDC would be an anchor industrial customer for the recycled water supply, providing a reliable, high-volume buyer that justifies the infrastructure investment needed to expand recycled water capacity.
The municipalities benefit because their wastewater treatment operations become more financially sustainable — a steady industrial buyer for treated effluent reduces the cost burden of disposal. The Colorado River benefits because a large industrial user that would otherwise require potable water is served by recycled supply instead. The Salton Sea benefits from the excess treated water that flows from upgraded treatment operations.
Why the Misleading Claim Persists
The 750,000-gallons-from-the-Colorado-River narrative persists for the same reason most misleading environmental claims persist: it is emotionally effective, it requires technical knowledge to refute, and the organizations making it are not being held accountable for its accuracy.
Water scarcity in the Colorado River basin is a genuine and serious issue. The Salton Sea’s decline is a genuine environmental crisis. These facts provide emotional scaffolding for the misleading claim — the listener fills in the logical connection between “water crisis” and “data center water use” without examining whether the data center is actually drawing from the scarce resource being described.
The developer has never proposed using potable water. The design has always called for recycled effluent. The will-serve letters that the City of Imperial allegedly pressured El Centro to rescind were the contractual foundation for the recycled water supply. The opposition blocked the recycled water deal and then continued using the potable water consumption narrative as if the recycled water plan didn’t exist.
What a Fact-Based Water Discussion Would Conclude
If the IVDC is evaluated on its actual proposed water use — recycled municipal effluent, 100 percent, from a closed-loop system — the water consumption argument against it collapses. The project does not compete with agricultural users for Colorado River allocations. It does not draw from the potable supply that residential and commercial users depend on. It uses water that is currently a disposal problem and turns it into a resource.
A fact-based environmental discussion about the IVDC would recognize this and move on to the questions that actually require analysis: the design specifications for the treatment upgrades, the terms of the will-serve agreements, the engineering of the cooling system. Those are legitimate technical discussions. They are not the discussions the opposition is having.
The discussion the opposition is having — 750,000 gallons from the Colorado River, every day — is not a fact-based environmental discussion. It is a political narrative designed to generate opposition from people who haven’t read the engineering documents. The people of Imperial Valley, who understand their water system better than anyone, deserve to be given the actual facts.