Southern California Edison lacks enough electricity to serve more than a dozen mega-warehouses planned near the 215 Freeway in Riverside County, and it could be two years before more power is available, county Supervisor Kevin Jeffries said.
During the Tuesday, April 12, Board of Supervisors meeting, Jeffries — who represents areas west of the 215 and Perris — said he heard the news from Edison representatives in a meeting he attended with upper-level county staff.
“The area of the 215 corridor — essentially you pretty much describe it from Alessandro (Boulevard) down to Menifee — Southern California Edison is out of power,” Jeffries said.
“They can no longer provide power — and some people applaud this — they can no longer provide power to the warehouses that are going in. One warehouse is 1.1 million square feet, and Target is preparing to move in, and they will have no power.”
Edison spokesman David Song said the company has been working with the county “and developers in the Mead Valley area to accommodate the electrical needs of planned industrial facilities which are critical to the economic vibrancy of the local community.”
Song did not directly address whether Jeffries’ comments were accurate. Nor did he respond to Jeffries’ assertion that Edison failed to keep the county in the loop about its ability to supply power to new warehouses.
Jeffries later said via email he was not referring to the 1.9 million-square-foot Target distribution center under construction between the 215 and March Air Reserve Base, but to a project near Cajalco Road and Harvill Avenue off the 215.
Fifteen other warehouses “may or may not also have power,” Jeffries added. “Edison didn’t tell us of this problem. We learned about it from a developer who is preparing to have their tenant move in this summer and couldn’t get power from Edison.”
In an email, Jeffries said the problem outlined by Edison only applies to “any new commercial facility that needs a significant amount of power from (Edison) circuits in that sub-region,” including the area around March.
“(Edison) didn’t think to tell the county of that and so we have all these permits (and) applications going through the process,” Jeffries said at Tuesday’s meeting.
“And we were caught — ‘What the heck is going on here? I mean, do we stop issuing permits? What do we do now?’”
“And so I don’t think that’s been fully vetted where we’re going to go next,” Jeffries said. “But they have a very, very serious problem and it’s going to take at least two years to figure out how they’re going to fix it.”
The information the county got from Edison “is very concerning,” county spokeswoman Brooke Federico said via email.
“The county is requesting additional information from Edison on the extent of the impacted area and capacity limitations,” she said. “We will need to evaluate that information further to see how it will affect development projects that are underway.”
A lack of wattage could slow an Inland logistics boom that’s transformed the local economy and landscape. With the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach an hour away, cheap, flat available land, a blue-collar workforce and easy access to interstates and rail lines, the Inland Empire has become America’s warehouse, a trend boosted further by surging e-commerce demand.
Warehouses of 1 million square feet — 17 football fields — or more are becoming Inland fixtures. About two miles from the Target warehouse under construction next to March, the owners of Westmont Village west of the 215 and south of Alessandro Boulevard want to rezone vacant land to accommodate a 1 million-square-foot logistics center.
Not far from Westmont are the Riverside neighborhoods of Orangecrest and Mission Grove. Those communities surround former Air Force land where a developer wants to build 1.8 million square feet of warehouse space.
Warehouses employ thousands, but critics say the jobs pay poorly and threaten workers’ health. Diesel-spewing trucks streaming to and from warehouses are blamed for worsening the region’s notoriously poor air quality and clogging roads with pavement-wrecking traffic.
