A 330 MW data center wanted to buy a farm, switch off the irrigation, and drink the difference — California's most powerful irrigation district said no, so it sued
- IVCM petition asked Imperial County judge to overturn IID's refusal to sell it roughly 287 million gallons to cool a proposed 330 MW data center
- The company pledged in writing as recently as February that the project would not touch Colorado River water
- The case turns on whether fallowed farmland water can be reassigned to industry, a precedent worth far more than the volume in dispute
A recent petition filed in Imperial County Superior Court has asked a judge to order a public utility to start selling water to the largest data center project in the state of California.
The volume at issue is modest by the standards of the Colorado River: 880 acre-feet a year, which the petition itself calculates at ~0.03 percent of the Imperial Irrigation District's 3.1 million acre-foot entitlement.
The legal precedent that it would set if such a motion was to be granted might however...
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