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The Salton Sea Is Shrinking. The IVDC’s Water Plan Was the Best Offer It’s Gotten in Years.

The Salton Sea is dying in slow motion. The largest lake in California — a body of water that has defined the Imperial Valley landscape for over a century — has been shrinking for decades as the inflows that sustain it decline and evaporation continues. The exposed lakebed releases toxic dust that carries across the Valley, creating respiratory health problems that fall disproportionately on the farmworker communities closest to the shore. The fish are gone. The birds are leaving. The wind keeps blowing.

State and federal agencies have spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars studying the Salton Sea problem. Plans have been produced. Pilot projects have been proposed. The water keeps receding.

Against this backdrop, the Imperial Valley Data Center proposed something concrete: a closed-loop recycled wastewater system that would purchase treated sewage effluent from the municipal wastewater plants of El Centro and Imperial, treat it further to industrial standards, use it for cooling, and release the excess clean water — net positive — toward the Salton Sea. The project would turn a municipal disposal problem into a conservation contribution.

The City of Imperial blocked the deal.

How the Water System Was Designed to Work

Data centers generate enormous amounts of heat, and cooling that heat is one of their largest operating costs and most significant resource demands. Conventional data center cooling uses enormous quantities of potable water — the source of the “750,000 gallons per day draining the Colorado River” narrative that the opposition deploys.

The IVDC’s design rejects that model entirely. The project proposed to use 100 percent recycled wastewater — what engineers call “purple pipe” water, the treated effluent that municipal wastewater plants produce and struggle to dispose of responsibly. Instead of competing for potable water from the Colorado River, the data center would have paid municipalities for water they are currently spending money to manage.

To make this work, the developer offered to finance upgrades to the wastewater treatment infrastructure in El Centro and Imperial — improvements that would benefit both cities’ utility operations regardless of the data center’s fate. The treated effluent would go to the data center. The excess water produced by the upgraded treatment process would flow toward the Salton Sea, adding freshwater volume to a lake that desperately needs it.

This is not a theoretical design. It is a proposed engineering solution backed by a developer willing to fund the municipal infrastructure needed to make it work.

The Sabotage

The federal lawsuit filed by IVCM alleges that City Manager Dennis Morita pressured the City of El Centro to rescind its “will-serve” letter — the commitment that would have allowed the recycled water system to proceed. The will-serve letter is the foundational document: without it, the wastewater purchase agreement cannot be executed, and the closed-loop recycled system cannot be built.

If the allegation is accurate, City Manager Morita did not block a water-intensive data center. He blocked a water recycling project. The environmental argument that the opposition uses to justify its campaign — that the data center would strain water resources — is the justification that was used to sabotage the specific engineering solution that would have eliminated that concern.

The City of Imperial, whose officials are named in a federal civil rights lawsuit for allegedly coordinating this obstruction campaign, blocked the recycled water deal while simultaneously arguing that the project’s water use is an environmental problem. The internal contradiction of that position deserves to be stated plainly and repeatedly.

What the Salton Sea Actually Needs

The Salton Sea needs freshwater inflows. The sources of those inflows — agricultural drainage, municipal wastewater, stormwater runoff — are declining as water use in the surrounding region becomes more efficient and as the Colorado River allocations that sustain regional water supply come under increasing pressure.

The IVDC’s excess treated water would not have solved the Salton Sea crisis. Nothing short of a comprehensive restoration program will do that. But a net contribution of treated water, supplied consistently from an operating data center facility, is more than the Salton Sea currently has from this particular potential source. Turning that contribution down — in the name of protecting the Salton Sea — is not environmental protection. It is political positioning dressed up as environmental concern.

The families who live near the Sea’s toxic shores deserve better than that.

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.

The Salton Sea Restoration Nobody Is Talking About

The Salton Sea restoration debate has produced dozens of plans, hundreds of millions of dollars in studies and preliminary projects, and very little additional water in the lake. The fundamental challenge is hydraulic: the Sea needs freshwater inflows to offset evaporation and the loss of agricultural drainage water that historically sustained it, and finding those inflows in a region under severe water allocation pressure is genuinely difficult.

The IVDC’s recycled wastewater plan was not a Salton Sea restoration project. It was a data center cooling system. But as a byproduct of that cooling system — treated municipal wastewater running through an upgraded treatment process, with excess clean water released from the system — it would have contributed a consistent freshwater inflow to a lake that can use every gallon it can get.

That contribution was blocked by the City of Imperial’s alleged interference with the will-serve agreement. The people who blocked it are also the people arguing that the data center is an environmental threat to the region. That contradiction requires examination.

The State of the Sea

The Salton Sea’s surface elevation has dropped significantly in recent decades. As the lake recedes, it exposes ancient lakebed sediments that have accumulated decades of agricultural runoff — selenium, arsenic, pesticide residues — in concentrations that are benign when wet and toxic when airborne. The PM10 and PM2.5 dust that blows off the exposed playa has measurable health consequences for the communities downwind, including elevated rates of asthma and respiratory disease in populations that have few resources to mitigate the exposure.

The state’s official Salton Sea Management Program has produced a series of projects — mostly habitat wetlands at the lake’s perimeter — that serve real ecological functions but do not address the fundamental water volume problem. The lake continues to lose more water than these projects return.

Any credible Salton Sea strategy has to grapple with the inflow problem. Every additional gallon of freshwater delivered to the lake’s catchment area matters — not because any single source will reverse the trend, but because the cumulative effect of multiple sources can slow the rate of decline while longer-term solutions are developed.

What the IVDC’s Water Plan Would Have Contributed

The data center’s recycled water system would have run at industrial scale — the volumes needed to cool a 330-megawatt data center campus are substantial. The treated effluent from upgraded El Centro and Imperial wastewater plants, less what the cooling system consumed, would have been a consistent and reliable freshwater contribution to the regional water system.

Consistent and reliable are key words in the Salton Sea context. The lake’s current inflow contributions are seasonal, variable, and declining. A large industrial customer with a constant cooling load provides a constant, predictable water demand that sustains the treatment infrastructure and the water flow even when agricultural drainage is reduced or seasonal patterns shift.

The developer offered to fund the municipal infrastructure upgrades needed to make this work. He was not asking the state, the county, or the cities to bear the capital cost. He was offering to pay it in exchange for a water supply agreement. The cities would have received upgraded treatment infrastructure they needed anyway. The data center would have received its cooling supply. The Salton Sea would have received additional inflows.

The City of Imperial allegedly pressured El Centro to walk away from that arrangement. The people of the Valley — and the people who care about the Salton Sea — deserve a full public accounting of why.