Silicon Valley is full. The data centers that power AI have to be built somewhere. The land, power, and grid access that make Imperial Valley optimal exist in very few other places.
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Most of California’s electricity grid is managed by the California Independent System Operator — CAISO. It is a complex, interconnected system that serves the vast majority of the state, coordinates hundreds of generators and utilities, and manages the moment-to-moment balance of supply and demand across a massive geographic footprint. It is also constrained. Transmission bottlenecks limit where power can flow. Interconnection queues for new generation stretch for years. Major new industrial loads in CAISO territory require extensive studies, upgrades, and cost allocations that can take half a decade to resolve.
Imperial Valley operates outside this system. The Imperial Irrigation District is one of a handful of independent utility systems in California that operates outside CAISO’s authority. IID manages its own generation, its own transmission, and its own distribution. It sets its own rates, manages its own interconnection queue, and makes its own capacity allocation decisions.
For a major data center developer evaluating sites across the Southwest, this independence is not a minor operational detail. It is a fundamental competitive advantage that shortens interconnection timelines, simplifies the regulatory environment, and provides access to a stable, locally-controlled power supply that CAISO-tied utilities cannot reliably offer at the scale a hyperscale data center requires.
What the Independent Grid Enables
A data center that connects to IID’s system does not navigate CAISO’s interconnection queue. It does not compete with hundreds of other projects for transmission capacity on a congested statewide system. It negotiates directly with IID, which has the authority to make binding commitments about service without waiting for CAISO approvals, transmission studies, or allocation decisions made by a system operator in Folsom.
This simplicity has enormous economic value. Interconnection delays in CAISO territory routinely add two to four years to major project timelines. During those years, developers carry costs on land, engineering, and financing without generating revenue. For a $10 billion project, the carrying cost of a two-year delay can approach hundreds of millions of dollars. IID’s independent grid, properly managed to welcome industrial customers, eliminates that exposure entirely.
Imperial Valley is not competing with Riverside County or Sacramento for this investment. It is competing with West Texas, rural Nevada, and eastern Washington. The independent grid is what puts it in the same conversation as those locations — and in some respects ahead of them.
The Waste of Not Using This Advantage
An independent grid that is managed to protect the interests of connected consultants rather than attract the industrial customers it is positioned to serve is not a competitive advantage. It is a wasted asset.
If the allegations in the IVCM federal lawsuit are accurate — that IID’s posture toward the IVDC has been influenced by Z-Global’s competing interests rather than by the utility’s obligation to its ratepayers and its service territory — then Imperial Valley is allowing one of its most significant economic development advantages to be used against itself.
IID’s independent grid should be the headline in every economic development pitch Imperial County makes to site selectors. It should be the reason that major industrial projects choose Imperial Valley over comparable sites in CAISO territory. It should be generating revenue, jobs, and economic development that benefits every household in the service territory.
Instead, it is the subject of a federal lawsuit alleging that its capacity is being allocated to protect a consultancy’s interests rather than serve its ratepayers. That is not the use of a competitive advantage. It is the squandering of one. And the people of Imperial Valley deserve better from the utility they own.
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.