On Thursday, August 6, Lyon County's commissioners approved the Monarch Data Center: roughly 505 acres of rural Mason Valley near Yerington, rezoned from rural residential for 14 buildings totaling 4.6 million square feet of data center, at least 1,000 megawatts of computing, and its own 500-megawatt gas-fired power plant with battery storage. The Nevada Independent and KOLO both covered the vote.
Nearly 300 people attended, in person and online. Most who spoke were opposed. The vote was 3 to 1, with one commissioner recused.
The opposition was not a handful of cranks. The Walker River Paiute and Yerington Paiute tribes passed formal resolutions against the project and say they will fight the decision in court. The Sierra Club's Toiyabe Chapter, which calls Mason Valley one of the most over-allocated groundwater basins in Nevada, promised to pursue "every available legal avenue." Neighbors raised wells, ranchland, waste heat, traffic, and noise.
Regular readers may recognize the county. Lyon County is where commissioners doing public business on private email produced the 2018 Nevada Supreme Court ruling we cited yesterday.
About water, two numbers worth sitting with. Copia Power, the developer, told the county its air-cooled campus would use under 100 acre-feet of water a year. The county's own staff report said under 800. Those numbers disagree by a factor of eight, and nothing has been built yet.
The scale is hard to picture from the acreage alone. KOLO puts 1,000 megawatts in the ballpark of 750,000 to one million homes. NV Energy has committed 2,550 megawatts to data centers over the next several years. Trade press puts Monarch at 11 billion dollars, backed by the Carlyle Group.
Here is why this is a Nye County story. On August 4 our own commissioners had a data center ban in front of them and voted 5 to 0 to let a special election decide instead, January 2027 at the earliest. A motion for an immediate ban died without a second. What stands between now and the election is a moratorium on new applications.
Now look at Lyon County's calendar. The planning commission recommended Monarch on July 15, by one vote. The board approved it three weeks later. The developer has a year to file its final development plan, and state permits are still ahead, but the county's part took one summer.
And the ground here is thirstier than Mason Valley's. Pahrump sits on a basin the state designated decades ago, with more water promised on paper than the valley yields, which is why the state engineer already restricts new domestic wells here.
The January ballot will ask Nye County the question Lyon County just answered. Between now and then, everything that matters will happen on agendas. Ours are on the meetings page, every bill and ordinance is tracked here, including the three items from the August 4 agenda nobody has reported on, and the alert list on the front page is how you hear about the next one before the vote instead of after.
