Is a Data Center in Lodi's Future?

Is a Data Center in Lodi's Future?

LodiEye — May 2026

What This Article Covers

At the May 6, 2025 Lodi City Council Meeting, Councilman Cameron Bregman raised the question of whether Lodi should explore data center opportunities — an idea, in his framing, worth examining seriously. This report accepts that invitation and asks: given Lodi's specific situation, what would actually be involved? Where would such a facility plausibly go, what would it cost, what would it return, and what could go wrong?

The most logical site to look at is the White Slough corridor off Interstate 5, where the city's power plants and wastewater treatment facility already sit close together. But that examination collides immediately with a major recent development. In October 2025, the U.S. Department of Energy cancelled $35 million in federal funding for the Lodi Energy Center Hydrogen Project — the clean-energy project that gives the White Slough corridor its appeal to data center developers. Rep. Josh Harder is fighting for restoration. As of this writing, the hydrogen project's near-term path is uncertain, and any data center plan that would lean on a clean-energy story is downstream of that uncertainty.

The bigger conclusion of this analysis is that Lodi cannot realistically host the kind of large data center making national headlines. The realistic ceiling at White Slough is something in the range of 5 to 15 megawatts — roughly the same scale as the Nautilus floating data center 25 miles south at the Port of Stockton, or Quest's facility in Roseville, or the smaller NTT data centers in Sacramento. Those are real, working facilities, not speculative. To put a 10-megawatt facility in everyday terms: it would use roughly as much electricity as 8,000 typical homes — about a third of all the homes Lodi Electric Utility serves. That smaller scope is a real opportunity, but it is a different opportunity than what marketing materials about California's data center boom typically imagine.

Why This Question, and Why White Slough

Bregman has not put forward a detailed data center plan. What he has done is publicly suggest the topic deserves exploration — that Lodi should examine whether and how data center investment could fit the city's economic future. This article treats that as an honest invitation to do the analysis.

The starting point is geography. The land along Thornton Road just off Interstate 5 already hosts an unusual cluster of energy and water facilities. The 296-megawatt Lodi Energy Center has run there since 2012 — a natural gas power plant operated by the Northern California Power Agency, a regional power authority that Lodi co-owns along with Modesto Irrigation District, the City of Santa Clara, BART, and several other California cities. Next to the main plant sit two smaller gas turbines that add about 74 more megawatts of generation. All three plants draw their cooling water from the City's White Slough Water Pollution Control Facility right next door, where Lodi's wastewater is treated and recycled. Together, these facilities make the White Slough corridor one of the most energy-rich industrial sites in San Joaquin County.

Bregman has separately been a vocal supporter of the proposed Lodi Energy Center Hydrogen Project, which he has framed as a way to "keep energy and utility costs low for residents." That project, as designed by engineering firm GHD, would use recycled water from White Slough plus renewable electricity to produce roughly 24 metric tons of low-carbon hydrogen per day — enough to scale up to 150 megawatts of equivalent generating capacity. The hydrogen would be blended into the Lodi Energy Center, which was upgraded in 2025 to run on up to 45 percent hydrogen mixed with natural gas.

The hydrogen project and the data center idea are separate ideas Bregman has raised. But they share a site, and they interact. A data center at White Slough that wanted to claim a clean-energy story would lean on the hydrogen project's existence; a data center pursued without the hydrogen project loses the main thing that would set Lodi apart from competing locations in Texas, Virginia, and Louisiana. Examining the data center opportunity therefore requires examining the hydrogen project's status. They are not the same proposal, but they are linked at the site, in the politics, and in the marketing pitch.

One important correction to common framing

Marketing materials sometimes imply that the existing 296 megawatts at the Lodi Energy Center could "power a data center." It cannot. That power is already promised by long-term contract to the cities and agencies that co-own the plant — serving roughly 700,000 Californians elsewhere through their electric utilities. Lodi itself only owns a 30-megawatt share. Any new local power need would require additional generation to be built, not simply re-routing electricity from the existing plant.

The Hydrogen Plant Dependency

Funding status as of May 2026: The Department of Energy cancelled $35 million in federal funding for the Lodi Energy Center Hydrogen Project on October 6, 2025, as part of a broader $8 billion rollback of clean energy projects. The original $1.2 billion ARCHES California Hydrogen Hub award — which named Lodi as a Tier 1 priority project — remains in restructuring. Rep. Josh Harder has formally demanded reversal of the cuts in correspondence with Energy Secretary Chris Wright.

The hydrogen project was originally targeted for completion by summer 2027. That timeline assumed federal funding was secure. With the funding now contested, the realistic completion window has slipped indefinitely — possibly to 2029 or later if alternative financing must be assembled.

This matters for the data center conversation in three concrete ways:

1. The clean-energy story is what would set Lodi apart. A data center pitch that includes hydrogen-blended power is something few competing California sites can offer. If the hydrogen plant doesn't get built, that advantage disappears, and Lodi competes head-on with Texas, Virginia, and Louisiana — states with cheaper electricity, faster permits, and lower construction costs.
2. One way to power a data center depends on the hydrogen plant. If the city or a developer considered building a small power plant on the data center's own site — using hydrogen as the fuel — the GHD design would produce roughly 15 to 20 megawatts of continuous electricity, scalable to perhaps 50 to 70 megawatts at the larger 150-megawatt build. Without the hydrogen plant, the alternatives are less appealing: a new natural gas turbine (which is politically and environmentally hard to permit in California), or simply expanding the regional electric grid through PG&E, which currently has a multi-year wait list for new connections.
3. Order matters. Committing the city to a development agreement that depends on a hydrogen plant that hasn't even broken ground is a long-term risk. The credible path is hydrogen plant first — with concrete construction milestones met — before any data center entitlements are issued.

For these reasons, the hydrogen funding question is not background context for the data center analysis. It is the gating issue.

What Lodi Can Actually Accommodate

Most national news coverage of data centers focuses on the giant facilities — sometimes called "hyperscale" — in the 100-to-1,000-megawatt range. Headlines about Meta's Hyperion campus (5,000 megawatts) or Amazon's New Carlisle, Indiana, project (several hundred megawatts) tell you where the industry's attention is. That is not where Lodi sits. The right starting question for a local discussion is not "what does the data center industry want?" but "what can Lodi actually deliver, given the power, water, and internet capacity that exist here today?"

Power

Lodi Electric Utility (LEU) sold 435,990 megawatt-hours of electricity in 2023 to its 27,659 customer accounts. To put that in plainer terms: at any given moment, Lodi's customers are using around 50 megawatts of electricity on average, with peaks closer to 90 to 110 megawatts on hot summer afternoons. LEU runs on a fixed set of neighborhood power stations and long-term electricity contracts through the Northern California Power Agency (the regional power authority Lodi co-owns). Adding a new large customer requires either room in the existing system or new investments in power stations, transformers, and distribution lines.

The City has not publicly disclosed exactly how much room is available — that is one of the questions this article suggests the Council ask. But a reasonable estimate is that LEU could absorb a new industrial customer of roughly 2 to 5 megawatts without major upgrades, 5 to 15 megawatts with a moderate substation upgrade, and beyond that only with significant new generation contracts and grid construction that take years. The realistic ceiling for a data center at White Slough is therefore around 15 megawatts. That is not a hard physical limit; it is the threshold above which the project becomes a multi-hundred-million-dollar grid investment that fundamentally changes the city's electric utility, rather than just hosting a new customer.

Water

The White Slough Water Pollution Control Facility processes roughly 8.5 million gallons of wastewater per day, which is its full design capacity, and it is currently running at exactly that level. The recycled water that comes out the other end is already in use: it cools the Lodi Energy Center, supplies the smaller turbines next door, and goes to nearby agricultural users. The proposed hydrogen plant would also draw on this recycled water as its main ingredient.

How much recycled water is left over for a new industrial customer is not publicly known — another priority question for the Council. A reasonable estimate is that 1 to 3 million gallons per day might be available for additional uses. That is enough to cool a data center somewhere between 5 and 15 megawatts using conventional evaporative cooling (cooling towers that release water as vapor) — or considerably more if the data center is required to use a closed-loop cooling system that recycles water rather than evaporating it.

The wastewater side is tighter. White Slough is already at its limit for handling new wastewater, before any data center is added. Cooling-tower runoff from a data center would add to that load, and the technical solution — deep injection wells, which the Lodi Energy Center already uses as a backup — comes with its own permitting timeline.

Internet capacity

Lodi has fewer competing internet providers than the cities where data centers cluster. Building out new high-speed internet lines to Sacramento (35 miles away) or the Bay Area (80-plus miles) for backup connections and faster routing would add an estimated $10 to $30 million and 18 months to any project. This can be done, but it is a real constraint on size: a data center much above 10 megawatts typically needs more carrier choice than Lodi currently has.

Lodi Capacity-Realistic Scenarios vs LEU 2023 Total

The 30-megawatt and 100-megawatt reference bars are shown in red because those scales are what the national industry is currently building, but they exceed what Lodi could realistically host without major new generation, transmission, and water investments. Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration; LodiEye analysis.

Even at the realistic 10-megawatt scale, a single data center would add roughly 18 percent to LEU's total annual electric load — making it, in one customer, the largest single user of electricity in Lodi by a wide margin. The scale conversation is therefore real, but it is a conversation about a 10-megawatt facility, not a 30-megawatt one.

Three Realistic Scenarios for Lodi

Working back from what Lodi can actually accommodate yields three credible scenarios. Each is anchored to a real working facility either operating today or recently announced, so the costs, jobs, and revenue figures come from observed deployments rather than industry averages.

Scenario A — Small Regional Facility (2 to 5 megawatts)

A facility serving regional disaster recovery, government continuity, healthcare imaging, and small-to-mid-size business computing. This size fits within Lodi's current power system with minimal upgrades and uses modest amounts of recycled water. Real-world facilities at this scale include:

• Lambda Labs San Jose — 2 megawatts, an AI-focused facility built in just 9 months in 2025, generating roughly $4 million per month in revenue from approximately 500 NVIDIA H100 graphics processors used for AI training.
• Datacate, Rancho Cordova — 5,000 square feet of computer room space inside an 18,000-square-foot building, serving small and mid-size businesses across the Sacramento region.
• EdgeConneX SAC01, Sacramento — 6,700-square-foot regional facility serving local content delivery and fast-response applications for Sacramento-area customers.

Construction cost: $20 to $60 million. Permanent jobs: 8 to 18. Annual revenue to City of Lodi at full operation: roughly $0.5 to $1.5 million across all sources.

Scenario B — Standard Multi-Tenant Facility (5 to 12 megawatts)

A multi-tenant facility serving regional businesses, government agencies, and hybrid-cloud customers. This is the upper end of what fits comfortably with moderate power-station upgrades, and it represents the realistic central case for any serious White Slough data center. Real-world facilities at this scale include:

• Nautilus Stockton 1 — 6.5 megawatts, hosted on a floating barge at the Port of Stockton, 25 miles south of Lodi. Operating since 2020. Tenants include the City of Stockton, San Joaquin County, a federal agency, and a Fortune 100 company. Uses river water for cooling with no net water consumption. This is the most directly comparable facility to what Lodi could build.
• Quest Roseville HABC — 8 megawatts in a 40,000-square-foot facility serving disaster recovery and high-availability hosting for Northern California businesses.
• NTT CA1, Sacramento — 12.6 megawatts in 85,000 square feet, serving Bay Area-overflow and Northern California businesses that need reliable computing space outside the Bay Area.
• CtrlS Patna Edge (India) — A planned 10-megawatt regional facility, $47 million total investment, illustrating the global pattern of 5-to-10-megawatt regional facilities as the fastest-growing segment of the data center industry. Real estate firm CBRE's 2025 mid-year report identifies this segment as the principal growth area outside hyperscale.

Construction cost: $60 to $150 million. Permanent jobs: 18 to 35. Annual revenue to City of Lodi at full operation: roughly $1.5 to $3.5 million across all sources.

Scenario C — Stretch Build (12 to 25 megawatts)

A larger regional facility requiring significant new electrical work and possibly new generation. This is the upper edge of what is conceivable at White Slough and would test the city's infrastructure limits. Real-world facilities at this scale include:

• NTT CA3, Sacramento — 14 megawatts in 64,723 square feet.
• Sungard Rancho Cordova — about 30,000 square feet of computer room space, the largest in the Rancho Cordova cluster, serving disaster recovery and high-availability customers.
• Metro Edge IMD1 Chicago — 24 megawatts initial commitment scaling to 53 megawatts, located in a federally-designated Opportunity Zone. Demonstrates the upper end of what a regional facility can be when sited with intentional community-investment goals.

Construction cost: $150 to $300 million. Permanent jobs: 30 to 55. Annual revenue to City of Lodi at full operation: roughly $3.5 to $6 million across all sources. This scenario approaches the threshold above which the project becomes a major utility-infrastructure undertaking, not just a new business locating in town.

What Lodi cannot realistically host: A 30-to-100-megawatt mid-size or large data center, or a hyperscale campus serving a single AWS, Google, Microsoft, or Meta customer. Sites at that scale require integrated grid investments, water expansion, internet capacity buildout, and political-permitting environments that California's tightening rules do not currently allow — and that Lodi specifically cannot deliver without effectively becoming a different city. Marketing pitches that suggest otherwise should be treated skeptically.

Real-World Data Centers at Lodi-Realistic Scale

The Lodi-realistic size range is precisely where the regional and mid-size data center segment is currently expanding. Real estate firm CBRE's 2025 mid-year report on North American data centers flags facilities "with relatively easy-to-secure power capacity of up to 10 megawatts" as the principal growth area outside the giant hyperscale plants. The industry is splitting in two: the very large facilities are getting larger, but the next tier down — 5-to-15-megawatt regional facilities serving fast-response computing needs — is also growing rapidly.

Existing facilities at Lodi-realistic scale

Within 100 miles of Lodi, the following operating data centers fall within the size range Lodi could realistically host:

• Nautilus Stockton 1 — 6.5 megawatts, Port of Stockton, operating since 2020
• Quest Roseville HABC — 8 megawatts, Roseville
• NTT CA1, CA3 — 12.6 and 14 megawatts respectively, Sacramento
• QTS Sacramento — 7-acre campus, multiple buildings
• Sungard Rancho Cordova — about 30,000 sq ft of computer room space
• EdgeConneX SAC01 — smaller regional facility, Sacramento
• Datacate Rancho Cordova — small/mid-size regional
• Conscious Computing Data Centers — high-reliability facility with its own dedicated electrical substation, Rancho Cordova

Recently announced or planned at this scale

The 5-to-15-megawatt range continues to attract new investment. Recent announcements include:

• EdgeConneX partnership with AI cloud provider Lambda for hybrid-cooled regional facilities in Chicago and Atlanta (announced 2025), supporting AI workloads at this scale.
• Vertical Bridge deploying small data centers at the base of cell towers nationwide for 5G applications.
• Multiple India-based 10-megawatt regional facilities from data center operator CtrlS in Patna, Ahmedabad, Bhubaneshwar, Bhopal, Lucknow, Kochi, and Guwahati — international evidence that 10 megawatts works as a standalone scale.
• SBA Edge, DartPoints, AtlasEdge, EdgePresence are all currently expanding regional facility portfolios in the 1-to-10-megawatt range across U.S. mid-size markets.

None of these are the names that show up in The New York Times coverage of the AI data center boom. They are also not the operators most local economic development teams pitch when they talk about "recruiting a data center." But they are the actual operators building at scales Lodi could plausibly host, and any serious Lodi conversation should focus on this segment, not on the giant hyperscale developers.

What Other Cities Got — And Why the Comparison Is Imperfect

Most public coverage of small-city data center experiences focuses on Quincy, Washington; Prineville, Oregon; The Dalles, Oregon; and Hillsboro, Oregon. These cities are useful reference points but they are not direct comparables for what Lodi could realistically host. Quincy hosts 632 megawatts of data center capacity. Prineville hosts roughly $2 billion of Meta investment plus Apple. Hillsboro hosts 18 sites totaling 429 acres. Each of these cities has at least 50 times more data center capacity than Lodi could plausibly accommodate.

The lessons from those cities still apply to Lodi, but they are lessons about deal structure, not scale. The pattern across all the cited examples is consistent: the deal terms determined the outcome more than the technology or geography did. Cities that wrote disciplined rate structures and tax frameworks captured benefits. Cities that competed on subsidies and abatements exported the cost to residents. That dynamic operates at every scale.

Quincy, Washington (population 8,500) — The model outcome

Quincy hosts roughly 632 megawatts of data center capacity across six major facilities, including Microsoft, Yahoo (now Oath), Sabey, NTT, H5, and Centeris. Two decades of operating history. Power comes from Grant County Public Utility District, a public power agency drawing on Columbia River hydroelectric — among the lowest electric rates in the United States at under three cents per kilowatt-hour.

The financial result for Quincy residents has been positive and visible. The city's property tax rate dropped from approximately three dollars per thousand dollars of assessed value in 2006 to under one dollar today. Roughly 65 percent of total Quincy property tax now comes from data centers. That tax base funded a new high school, a new hospital, a new public safety building, and major infrastructure upgrades. In January 2026, Microsoft publicly committed to paying full electric infrastructure costs and using closed-loop water systems — partly responsive to community criticism, but also recognition that the public-power model works when rates are honest. Important context: Quincy's outcome required two decades and 632 megawatts of data center capacity. A 10-megawatt Lodi facility would not produce a Quincy-style transformation; the dollar contribution would be roughly a hundred times smaller.

Prineville, Oregon (population 10,500) — The fee-on-power model

Prineville hosts Meta and Apple campuses with roughly 600 permanent jobs paying at least 130 percent of the county average wage. Meta's annual fee to the city — a percentage charge on the electricity the data center uses — has grown from $300,000 at the first facility to $3 million today, covering roughly 6 percent of the city's general operating budget. Apple uses approximately 10 percent of Prineville's drinking water and paid $8.7 million to build underground water storage that benefits both Apple and the city. This fee-on-electricity-use model is the most directly applicable to Lodi, even at smaller scale — a 10-megawatt Lodi facility could plausibly generate $300,000 to $700,000 a year in fee revenue, which is meaningful but not transformative.

Hillsboro, Oregon (population 110,000) — The cautionary tale on rates

Hillsboro hosts 18 data center sites totaling 429 acres, served by Portland General Electric, a private utility company. Residential electricity rates rose roughly 50 percent over five years, while data centers paid less than half what residents paid per kilowatt-hour. A January 2026 community petition called for a halt to new data centers. Oregon passed legislation (House Bill 3546, the POWER Act) in 2025 to force data centers to cover their own costs. The Hillsboro pattern is what Lodi must avoid — and it is avoidable in part because Lodi is much smaller and would host much less data center capacity. The cost-shifting only operates at scale, but the principle applies: any Lodi data center should pay its full cost of service, period.

The Dalles, Oregon (population 16,000) — The water cautionary tale

Google's data center campus now consumes approximately 40 percent of The Dalles municipal water supply. This trajectory is what Lodi's reclaimed-water siting at White Slough is structurally designed to avoid. A 10-megawatt facility using reclaimed water from White Slough is not in the same hydrologic category as a multi-hundred-megawatt Google campus drawing on potable supply — but the trap reappears if data center demand expands beyond reclaimed-water capacity into potable supply, which is why disciplined limits on potable use need to be in any development agreement.

Indianapolis — The killed project

Google withdrew a $1 billion data center proposal in September 2025 after sustained community opposition. The room "erupted in cheers" when the rezoning was pulled. The political risk of investing in a project before meaningful community consultation is real, recent, and well-documented — and that risk operates at any scale, including the 10-megawatt scale Lodi could host.

Comparable Cities: Outcome for Residential Customers (Note Scale Differences)

Hillsboro is served by Portland General Electric, a private utility. Quincy is served by Grant County PUD, a publicly-owned utility. Prineville's fee-on-electricity-use does not directly affect retail rates. Each city hosts at least 50 times the data center capacity Lodi could realistically host, so the absolute dollar outcomes do not transfer directly. Source: Oregon Citizens' Utility Board; Washington Department of Revenue Data Center Workgroup 2025 report; Crook County, Oregon, fiscal documents.

Impact on Lodi's Residents and Growth Plans

Residential customers

The single most important question for Lodi's 25,077 residential electric customers is whether they will end up paying part of the data center's costs through their own electric bills. The honest answer depends entirely on how the City Council, acting as the board of Lodi Electric Utility, sets the billing rate for any large industrial customer over 5 megawatts.

Three things could happen. The fair-cost approach: The data center is put on its own rate that covers every dollar of cost the utility incurs to serve it — the power itself, the wires, the substations, the long-term electricity contracts — with a 15-year minimum-payment commitment. Residential bills are not affected, or might even improve slightly because the data center helps cover the utility's overhead. This is the Quincy, Washington model. The subsidy drift: The city offers a "competitive" rate below the true cost in order to win the project. Over time, the cost of building out new infrastructure to serve the data center gets folded into the rates everyone pays. Residential customers gradually subsidize the data center. This is the Hillsboro, Oregon pattern. The stranded-investment risk: The data center pays its own way while it's operating, but the city carries the upfront cost of building the infrastructure. If the data center leaves early or shrinks, residents are left holding the bill.

The choice between the Quincy outcome and the Hillsboro outcome is a political decision Lodi's leaders own, not a technical inevitability.

Commercial and industrial customers

Lodi's 2,559 commercial customers and 23 industrial customers together generate roughly $20 to $30 million per year for the utility and contribute far more to the local tax base and employment. Even a 10-megawatt data center would, in just one customer, add electricity demand comparable to a meaningful share of all of Lodi's existing industrial users combined. This raises a real question for the city: when the next local industrial expansion comes along — a winery wanting a new bottling line, a food processor wanting to add capacity — does the existing local business get the available electrical capacity, or has it already been promised to the data center?

Lodi's existing industrial base — Pacific Coast Producers, food and beverage processors, area wineries — is already operating in a state where electricity costs are roughly 45 percent above the U.S. average. Any additional pressure on rates erodes their ability to compete against out-of-state alternatives. A data center, on the other hand, doesn't tie into the local economy the way other businesses do. It doesn't buy from local suppliers in volume, doesn't sell to local customers, doesn't anchor a supply chain.

The General Plan and Lodi's growth

Lodi's General Plan envisions the city growing to 99,000 residents (a 47 percent increase from today's 67,000) and 51,000 jobs. To support that growth, Lodi Electric Utility's annual electricity sales will likely need to grow from 436 million kilowatt-hours today to roughly 600 to 700 million kilowatt-hours — and meaningfully more than that if more residents drive electric cars and replace gas appliances with electric ones, as state policy expects.

A 10-megawatt data center would add about 80 million kilowatt-hours per year — roughly 30 to 40 percent of the additional electricity Lodi's planned residential and commercial growth would otherwise need. This is not a deal-breaker, but it does mean that hosting the data center would pre-commit a meaningful share of Lodi's growth capacity. The Council would need to plan explicitly to make sure both the data center and the city's planned residential and commercial growth can be served, with cost-sharing rules that don't let the data center pay only for an undersized solution. A larger 15-to-25-megawatt facility would consume an even larger share of growth capacity and would seriously limit Lodi's ability to attract other large employers in the future.

Wastewater is the constraint that doesn't get enough attention. The White Slough plant treats 8.5 million gallons of wastewater per day at full capacity, and it is currently running at exactly that level. There is essentially no room left even for the city's normal growth, let alone a data center adding cooling-tower runoff. The plant will need to be expanded regardless; a data center just speeds up that timeline.

Revenue and Jobs — What Lodi Gets

If Lodi hosted a 10-megawatt data center under disciplined deal terms, the annual revenue to the city would grow as the facility filled up with tenants. The numbers below are illustrative based on industry averages; actual figures depend entirely on the specific deal.

Estimated Annual Revenue to City of Lodi — 10 MW Facility, Phasing In

Estimates assume a 10-megawatt standard facility — comparable to Quest Roseville HABC or NTT CA1 in Sacramento — with the data center paying its full costs. Property tax figures show only the city's share after county and special-district allocations. The "LEU margin" is the standard markup the utility charges over its wholesale electricity cost. The "possessory interest" tax line applies only if the facility sits on city-owned land. Source: LodiEye analysis.

For context: Lodi's 2024-2025 budget projects an approximately $1 million annual structural shortfall over five years, with $2.2 million already lost in business license tax revenue. A 10-megawatt facility at full operation would generate roughly $2 to $3 million per year in city revenue from all sources combined — meaningful but not transformational. It would offset the structural shortfall but not fund major new capital projects. A smaller 2-to-5-megawatt facility would generate roughly $0.5 to $1.5 million per year. A larger 15-to-25-megawatt facility could approach $3.5 to $6 million per year, but with much larger infrastructure risk for the utility and the city.

Job creation at the 10-megawatt scale is 18 to 35 permanent positions paying $80,000 to $140,000 a year, plus 150 to 350 construction jobs over an 18-to-30-month build. These are real jobs at real wages, but the per-acre and per-dollar-invested employment numbers are low compared to most other industrial categories. For perspective: the entire Meta-and-Apple campus in Prineville — a roughly $2 billion investment — produces 600 permanent jobs. A Lodi-realistic facility would produce 30 to 50 permanent jobs at a fraction of that capital investment.

If Lodi Proceeds, the Deal Terms Matter More Than the Technology

The difference between Quincy's outcome and Hillsboro's outcome was almost entirely about how the deal was structured — the billing rate the data center paid and whether it received tax breaks. Lodi has the structural advantage to follow the Quincy path: it owns its own electric utility, it has the integrated water and power site at White Slough, it has available land, and it has room to negotiate. But that advantage only translates into good outcomes if the City Council writes disciplined deal terms before a developer arrives, not after.

Twelve protective conditions for any serious proposal

1. The data center pays its own full costs. Any customer over 5 megawatts goes on a separate billing rate that covers every dollar of cost. The city has the right to inspect their records to verify.
2. Infrastructure paid for up front. The substation, distribution lines, and electricity contracts get paid for by the developer before construction starts — not paid back over time by the utility.
3. Minimum 15-year commitment. The data center signs a contract requiring minimum payment for at least 15 years (matching the framework in pending California legislation, SB 886). If they leave early, they pay for the rest.
4. Cooling that recycles water. If the data center's water demand exceeds a defined share of the recycled water available at White Slough, it is required to use a closed-loop or hybrid cooling system that recycles water rather than evaporating it.
5. Hydrogen-blend or carbon-free backup power. Backup generators are committed in the development agreement, not just promised in marketing — no fleet of diesel generators showing up later as the actual reality.
6. Full air-quality permitting. Any power plant built for the data center on its own site must go through full review by the regional air pollution agency (San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District). No fast-track waivers.
7. Local hiring commitments with real teeth. Wages must be at least 130 percent of the county average (the standard Prineville achieved). Specific milestones for local hires, with money the developer forfeits if commitments are missed.
8. Water-conservation cost-sharing. The developer pays for water-conservation infrastructure, modeled on the agreement Apple struck with Prineville to fund underground water storage that benefits the whole community.
9. Visual screening, sky-friendly lighting, noise mitigation. Built into the development agreement so the data center doesn't degrade the surrounding area — setting a Lodi standard for any future industrial siting.
10. Internet capacity that benefits the whole community. Any new high-speed internet lines built for the data center should also serve LodiNet, schools, public safety, and underserved residential pockets.
11. Wastewater discharge protections. White Slough's compliance with state water-quality permits cannot be compromised by data center discharge.
12. Annual public reporting. The data center reports yearly on water use, electricity use, employment, and tax payments — broken out specifically for the Lodi facility, not buried in corporate aggregates.

What Lodi should avoid: Tax breaks designed to attract a data center (California already has a state-level sales tax exemption on data center equipment, so adding city-level breaks just gives away revenue without adding incentive). Rezoning the land before the community has been meaningfully consulted. Development agreements signed before the hydrogen plant has actually broken ground. Non-binding "letters of interest" or memorandums of understanding from large operators that are not backed by deposits the city can keep if the deal falls through.

What the City Council Should Be Asking

Several pieces of public information that should exist either are not in the public record or have not been compiled into a single accessible document. These are the questions LodiEye will be filing public records requests for, and that Council members can ask city staff:

• What is Lodi Electric Utility's current peak electricity demand, and how much room is there to add new large industrial customers?
• How much recycled water from White Slough is left over after the Lodi Energy Center and the smaller turbines next door take what they need?
• Has the city commissioned any feasibility study, formal or informal, on a data center at White Slough?
• Has any specific developer or large data center company expressed interest in the White Slough site through a site visit, letter, or formal request to connect?
• What is the current status of efforts to restore the federal funding for the hydrogen project, and what is the Northern California Power Agency's backup plan if the funding doesn't come back?
• What does the 2024 Lodi Strategic Vision hydrogen-hub support resolution actually authorize, and does it cover an industrial co-tenant like a data center?
• Has the regional air pollution agency (San Joaquin Valley APCD) given any preliminary signal on whether hydrogen-blend backup generation could substitute for diesel generators?
• How does the city currently allocate available electrical capacity to new industrial customers — first-come-first-served, or reserved for the residential and commercial growth in the General Plan?
• Has the White Slough wastewater plant capacity expansion plan been updated to account for the possibility of cooling-tower discharge from a data center?
• Has Lodi Electric Utility consulted with the Northern California Power Agency on whether the agreement that governs the existing power plant allows on-site generation contracts for a non-member industrial customer?

These ten questions should be answered before any specific proposal moves forward to the entitlements stage. The answers will determine what kind of project, if any, would actually serve Lodi residents.

About This Report

LodiEye is the investigative research arm of Lodi411.com, a citizen-run civic data and transparency platform serving Lodi, California and San Joaquin County. LodiEye is not a traditional news outlet. It does not employ professional journalists or reporters, and the people behind it do not hold journalism degrees or have professional newsroom experience. LodiEye is best understood as civic research and analysis — not peer journalism — and is not a substitute for the local and regional news organizations that do this work professionally. For traditional reporting on Lodi, San Joaquin County, and the broader region, readers are encouraged to consult the Lodi News-Sentinel, Stocktonia, The Sacramento Bee, CalMatters, and other established news outlets staffed by credentialed journalists.

This LodiEye analysis was produced using artificial intelligence tools under the direction and review of the founder. Lodi411 uses multiple AI platforms in its research and publication workflow, including Anthropic's Claude (primarily Opus and Sonnet models) and Perplexity AI across a variety of large language models offered by each. These tools were used in the following capacities:

Source Discovery: AI-assisted search and retrieval identified roughly fifty primary and secondary sources covering the Lodi Energy Center, White Slough Water Pollution Control Facility, the Lodi Energy Center Hydrogen Project and the broader ARCHES California Hydrogen Hub program, the U.S. Department of Energy's October 2025 funding cancellation, the City of Lodi's General Plan and 2024-2025 budget, U.S. Energy Information Administration utility data for Lodi Electric Utility, comparable city case studies (Quincy, Prineville, Hillsboro, The Dalles, Indianapolis), real-world data center deployments in the 2-to-15-megawatt range across Northern California, and California's evolving regulatory environment for large electricity loads. Perplexity AI was used for initial source discovery and real-time data retrieval; Claude was used for deeper analysis of identified sources.

Credibility Validation: Sources were tiered by credibility, prioritizing government and regulatory documents (California Energy Commission, Northern California Power Agency, City of Lodi, EIA, DOE, CPUC, Public Advocates Office, Little Hoover Commission) over secondary news and industry research. Claims were cross-referenced across multiple independent sources. Marketing materials and corporate communications were used only to characterize a position, never as the sole source for a factual claim. Multiple AI models were used to independently flag inconsistencies in figures and attributions.

Analysis and Synthesis: Claude performed the load-comparison calculations between Lodi Electric Utility's 2023 retail sales and capacity-realistic data center scenarios, the water-consumption ratios against White Slough's processing capacity, the revenue-to-city projections under industry-standard assumptions, the capacity-realistic scenario sizing based on Lodi's actual infrastructure constraints (substation and contract headroom, reclaimed-water surplus, fiber availability), and the cross-city comparative analysis on rate-class structures and tax-abatement frameworks.

Presentation: Claude assisted in drafting prose, structuring the article narrative around capacity-first analysis rather than market-aspirational scoping, designing the Kendo chart specifications for the load comparison, comparable-cities outcome, and revenue-ramp visualizations, and organizing the content flow from question through analysis to protective conditions and open questions for the City Council.

Final Review: Multiple AI models reviewed the completed draft for factual consistency, source attribution accuracy, logical coherence, and balanced presentation. Multi-tool cross-checking across Claude and Perplexity served as the principal error-reduction mechanism. Editorial judgments, attribution decisions, scenario calibration, and final publication decisions were made by the founder.

Lodi411/LodiEye believes transparency about AI use serves both readers and the broader information ecosystem. Readers who spot errors are encouraged to write editor@lodi411.com so corrections can be made.

References

Trusted Sources

1. California Energy Commission. Lodi Energy Center facility record and post-certification amendments. energy.ca.gov
2. Northern California Power Agency. Lodi Energy Center and Combustion Turbine Projects documentation. ncpa.com
3. City of Lodi. Lodi Energy Center Hydrogen Project announcement, October 13, 2023. lodi.gov
4. City of Lodi. White Slough Water Pollution Control Facility documentation; Sewer Collections capacity data. lodi.gov
5. City of Lodi. 2024-2025 Annual Budget; General Plan buildout targets.
6. U.S. Energy Information Administration. Lodi Electric Utility 2023 retail sales filing. Form EIA-861.
7. U.S. Department of Energy. ARCHES California Hydrogen Hub selection, October 2023. Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations.
8. U.S. Representative Josh Harder. October 6, 2025 statement on DOE funding cancellation. harder.house.gov
9. California Public Utilities Commission. SB 57 (Padilla, 2025) docket and CPUC data center cost-shifting study.
10. Public Advocates Office, CPUC. "How Will Data Center Growth Impact California Ratepayers?" October 2025.
11. Little Hoover Commission. "Data Centers and California Electricity Policy." March 2026.
12. Washington Department of Revenue. Data Center Workgroup Preliminary Report. December 1, 2025.
13. City of Hillsboro, Oregon. "Data Centers in Hillsboro: Your Questions Answered." Updated 2026.
14. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Behind-the-meter colocation interconnection filings (PJM and other ISOs).
15. San Joaquin Council of Governments. Lodi One Voice 2024 federal priorities documentation. sjcog.org
16. GHD. Lodi Hydrogen Facility Development Plan project documentation. ghd.com

Secondary Sources

1. Lodi News-Sentinel. Coverage of Bregman, Hothi, and Lodi Energy Center Hydrogen Project, 2023-2025.
2. Cushman & Wakefield. U.S. Data Center Development Cost Guide, 2025 and 2026 editions.
3. CalMatters. "California AI Data Center Rules Blocked by Big Tech." December 2025.
4. LAist. "Big Tech Blocks California Data Center Rules." December 2025.
5. Mayer Brown. "Efforts to Regulate California Data Centers Falter — For Now." December 2025.
6. Mayer Brown. "Proposed California Legislation Aims to Reshape Land Use Approvals for Data Centers." April 2026.
7. Brookings Institution. "Confronting and Addressing Rising Energy Bills Linked to Data Centers." March 2026.
8. Harvard Law Today. "How Data Centers May Lead to Higher Electricity Bills." Interview with Ari Peskoe, September 2025.
9. Bloomberg. "How AI Data Centers Are Sending Your Power Bill Soaring." September 2025.
10. Consumer Reports. "AI Data Centers: Big Tech's Impact on Electric Bills, Water, and More." March 2026.
11. Power Magazine. "Top Plants: Lodi Energy Center, Lodi, California." September 2012.
12. Geekwire. "Washington's Data Center Boom Fuels Tax Windfalls and Energy Struggles." August 2025.
13. Oregon Public Broadcasting. "A Small Town in Central Washington Is Microsoft's Answer to the Data Center Backlash." January 2026.
14. Oregon Public Broadcasting. "Represented: Data Centers and Taxation in Central Oregon." 2020.
15. The Oregonian. "Apple to Pay for Prineville Water Storage for Data Centers' Thirst." 2018.
16. KLCC. "Oregon's Data Center Explosion: Who Benefits and Who Bears the Cost?" April 2026.
17. Cascade Business News. "Data Centers and Central Oregon." February 2026.
18. Quincy Valley Post-Register. "Quincy Data Centers Drive Growth, Lower Levy Rates, Report Finds." January 2026.
19. KATU. "In Hillsboro, Petition Seeks Pause on New Data Centers Amid Energy and Farmland Concerns." 2026.
20. Hillsboro Herald. "Oregon Makes a Move on Data Centers and Consumer Rate Increases." 2025.
21. Oregon Capital Chronicle. "Data Centers and Their Neighbors." June 2025.
22. Site Selection Magazine. "San Joaquin County: The County Hardwired for Capital Investment." September 2021.
23. DataCenterDynamics. "Nautilus Data Technologies Launches First Floating Data Center." April 2021.
24. Nautilus Data Technologies. Stockton 1 facility documentation. nautilusdt.com
25. Government Technology. "Stockton, Calif., Poised to Be Tenant on Floating Data Barge." April 2024.
26. FindEnergy. City of Lodi Electric utility profile (compiles EIA data).
27. Cleanview / Distilled.earth. "Bypassing the Grid: How Data Centers Are Building Their Own Power Plants." February 2026.
28. Union of Concerned Scientists. "Data Centers Are Already Increasing Your Energy Bills." October 2025.
29. Citizens Utility Board (Illinois). "How Data Centers Are Raising Our Bills in Illinois." 2025.
30. Environmental and Energy Study Institute. "Data Center Power Demands Are Contributing to Higher Energy Bills." February 2026.