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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.

The Environmental Case FOR the IVDC: What the Opposition Doesn’t Want You to Calculate

The environmental case against the Imperial Valley Data Center rests on three claims: it will drain the Colorado River, it will crash the IID grid, and it deserves comprehensive environmental review before proceeding. Each of these claims has been examined in detail and found to be either factually inaccurate or legally unsupported. Taken together, they do not constitute an environmental argument against the project — they constitute an environmental argument that requires not looking at the project’s actual design.

The environmental case for the project has received far less public attention, because the project’s environmental benefits are not politically useful to the opposition and have therefore not been amplified. Here is what that case looks like.

Water: Net Positive for the Region

The IVDC proposes to use 100 percent recycled municipal wastewater — treated effluent that El Centro and Imperial currently manage as a disposal challenge. No Colorado River water. No competition with agricultural users. No draw on the potable supply that residential communities depend on.

The project also proposed to finance upgrades to El Centro’s and Imperial’s wastewater treatment infrastructure — improvements that would increase those plants’ capacity and quality of output regardless of the data center’s fate. The treated effluent in excess of the data center’s cooling needs would flow toward the Salton Sea, adding to the freshwater inflows that the lake desperately needs.

This is not a neutral environmental impact. It is a positive contribution to the region’s most pressing water management challenge. The opposition blocked the will-serve agreement that would have made it possible, and then continued arguing that the project’s water use is an environmental problem.

Grid: Additional Stability Capacity

The 862 MWh battery storage system stores power during off-peak periods and discharges during peak demand, performing the grid stabilization function that IID would otherwise have to procure from other sources. The dedicated 330-megawatt substation is built at the developer’s expense, adding transmission infrastructure to IID’s service territory without cost to ratepayers.

These are not incidental features. They represent a substantial private capital investment in grid infrastructure that benefits the entire IID service territory. The environmental and operational value of grid stabilization — reduced curtailment of renewable generation, smoother load curves, lower reserve requirements — is real and quantifiable. The project provides it as a design feature.

Land: Industrial Zoning in an Industrial Location

The project site is zoned I-2 Heavy Industrial and surrounded by industrial land uses. It is not adjacent to a residential neighborhood. It is not adjacent to sensitive habitat. It is not encroaching on agricultural land. It is an industrial project built on industrial land for which it is zoned, consistent with the land use plan that the county adopted through a legitimate public process.

The environmental review argument — that this project needs a full EIR despite its ministerial approval — is not driven by genuine concern about the project’s location or its compatibility with adjacent uses. It is driven by the desire to impose a process that would delay the project long enough for its financing to collapse. That is not an environmental protection strategy.

The Real Environmental Choice

If this data center is not built in Imperial Valley, the computing infrastructure it would have housed will be built somewhere else — in a state with a dirtier grid, with higher water consumption from potable sources, on land with fewer industrial precedents. The environmental profile of data center infrastructure does not disappear because Imperial Valley declines to host it. It relocates to a jurisdiction with fewer environmental safeguards.

Blocking the IVDC does not protect the environment. It exports the environmental impact to another location while denying Imperial Valley the economic benefits of hosting it. For a region that has been asked to absorb the environmental costs of agricultural production, water management infrastructure, and industrial activity for generations, being told to also forfeit the economic benefits of technology infrastructure in the name of environmental protection is not a reasonable ask.

The people of Imperial Valley understand the difference between environmental protection and environmental theater. They have been living with the consequences of the real thing for a long time.