LETTER: The vast potential of the Primm corridor

The Primm corridor along Interstate 15 is waiting for a supplemental airport that may not arrive until 2037. Meanwhile, the casinos at Primm have shuttered, Jean is a ghost town, and 30 miles of desert sits idle while Nevada watches the AI data center gold rush happen in Reno instead.

Data centers are requesting enough power to triple NV Energy’s grid capacity. Northern Nevada is scrambling to accommodate them, straining water supplies, overwhelming the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center and building a new 1,800-megawatt natural gas plant in Fernley. So much for Greenlink’s promise of decommissioning fossil fuels.

Southern Nevada has something Reno doesn’t: some of the best solar and wind resources on the continent, sitting on federal land already slated for development. The corridor between Sloan and Primm is getting Brightline West rail, a widened interstate and new utility infrastructure. The bones are being built regardless.

Here’s the policy that makes this work: require any data center in the Primm corridor to be net-positive on the grid. Not carbon-neutral through purchased offsets. Actually generate more clean energy than you consume and feed the surplus back to Las Vegas ratepayers. Make it a condition of the land lease.

The cascade writes itself. Data centers need power, so solar and wind farms get built. Farms need panels and turbines, so manufacturing moves in. Manufacturing needs workers, so housing follows. Primm and Jean don’t have to stay dead. They just need a reason to come back to life and a policy smart enough to make sure the rest of us benefit when they do. Leave the corridor a little better than you found it.