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.