California ordered 6 gigawatts of new power for data centers. The Inland Empire makes almost none of its own.

Citrus Belt Review: The clearest marker of the difference is sitting decommissioned in Riverside County. The Inland Empire Energy Center, an 800-MW combined-cycle gas plant, shut down in 2019 and was torn down by March 2021 — closed because it couldn't compete in California's market. While power developers in the PJM footprint describe a pipeline "bursting at the seams," the largest generator inside this corridor was scrapped as uneconomic. The IE runs on power produced somewhere else and wheeled in over Southern California Edison's wires. That was a manageable arrangement when the load was warehouses, which draw modest, steady power. It becomes a harder problem when the new tenant is a server hall.

The demand is no longer hypothetical. The California Energy Commission's planning forecast puts data centers at roughly 1,000 MW, about 2% of CAISO's peak, in early 2026, and projects 4,500 MW — 9% of peak — by 2040. In February, the California Public Utilities Commission ordered 6 GW of new capacity built largely to meet that forecast data-center and electric-vehicle load. Those are statewide figures; no public number isolates how much of it lands in the Inland Empire. But the IE is where Southern California still has cheap, flat, developable land near transmission, and developers priced out of Santa Clara are already scouting it.

That sets up a collision the PJM frame doesn't capture. In the East, the constraint is commercial: get the data center to sign a 20-year offtake and the queued megawatts get financed. Here, the constraint is physical and local. SCE was forced to sell most of its power plants in the 1990s restructuring and is now a wires company — its job is moving electrons, not making them, and the bottleneck shows up as transformer capacity and interconnection studies, not unsigned contracts. A logistics economy provisioned its grid for forklifts. The bill for re-provisioning it for compute has not yet been written, and when it is, it lands on every ratepayer sharing those wires.