Lake County has no application for a data center, no rule about data centers and a moratorium it has decided not to use yet. Across the county line, Mendocino County supervisors wrote one, passed it, and extended it to 2028 without ever naming an applicant.
Lake County’s position was laid out at the Middletown Area Town Hall on Oct. 8, in a library meeting room with people standing in the hall.
“At this moment, there’s been nothing brought to the county at all that states data centers,” District 1 Supervisor Helen Owen told the room. Later in the evening she said it again. “There’s no permit application.” Not even a pre-application, she said, which is the step where a developer tells the county what it intends.
Owen sits on the board’s energy ad hoc committee. She said the committee considered an emergency moratorium and chose to hold it. A county can adopt one on about 10 days’ notice, she said, and it can run no more than two years. If the county started the clock now and a proposal arrived at the end of 2027, “we would burn up a year and a half of it and we’d only have six months.”
“We will still have this tool in our pocket that we can stop it with, that can buy us up to two years to get a permanent in place,” she said. If an inquiry shows up, “within 10 days, we can bring that moratorium forward.”
What's on paper
Thomas Lajcik followed her with a slide deck. “I’m not a county employee,” he said, and he isn’t a consultant for anyone either. He is retired, lives on the other side of the lake, and spent his working life at a large IT company where he said about 40% of the contracts involved data centers.
He walked the room through what a 200-megawatt data center is, then through the public record on the Red Hills.
Red Hills JJI LLC, a Delaware company run by Jon Vein and Joshua Held of Southern California, filed a Form D with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Sept. 3, 2025, for a $20 million private offering. The amendment filed Sept. 1 of this year reports $6.99 million sold to 17 investors. The form lists the company’s business as “Other Real Estate.” It doesn’t mention Lake County, geothermal or data centers.
The Los Angeles Business Journal filled in the rest in November 2025. It reported that Vein and Held had founded Red Hills Ranch, acquired about 1,000 acres in Lake County and were doing site planning and entitlement work while looking for financing, data center developers and tenants. The power was to come from XGS Energy, a geothermal company whose system circulates water through closed pipes to reach heat in the rock.
Lake County’s own parcel maps put the land south of Kelseyville along state routes 175 and 29. Five parcels there, 641.57 acres in all, list the same mailing address, in Los Alamitos, that Red Hills JJI gave the SEC. The county records on them are dated Sept. 30, 2025.
Owen said the Red Hills deal is a lease, not a purchase, and that it covers geothermal only.
Lajcik said Red Hills and XGS are essentially the same people. “They have the same mailing address. They have some of the same officers,” he said of Red Hills and XGS.
In comments filed with the California Energy Commission on May 15, XGS said it “has confirmed significant viable geothermal heat resources” for its technology “in Lake and Sonoma counties, outside of the existing defined Geysers” resource area. In July it told the commission it’s lining up gigawatts of California projects to meet “clean-firm demand from industry and data centers.”
XGS also pointed the commission to a new law. Assembly Bill 531, signed Oct. 6, 2025, lets a geothermal power plant of any size opt into the commission’s certification process, which the bill’s digest says is “in lieu of any permit, certificate, or similar document required by any governmental agency.” XGS described the law to the commission as opening the state’s streamlined certification to “geothermal projects of any size.”
Owen said a data center can’t take that route. “They can’t with the data center,” she said. “They’re going to have to come to the county.”
Lake County’s electrical load is about 44 megawatts, Lajcik said, citing Pacific Gas and Electric Co. figures that Sonoma Clean Power collected in 2025. “That one data center is about four times our current electrical load,” he said. He put a 200-megawatt plant at a quarter or more of what the Geysers produces today.
He said he doesn’t report to anybody. His advice: “we should err on the side of caution.”
Who has talked to the county
The energy ad hoc committee’s presentation that night listed every energy project the county knows about. One has an application: a wind farm in Morgan Valley, now in environmental review. Three geothermal projects have talked to staff, including the Red Hills one, and two hydrogen exploration ventures have asked about looking around. “There’s three geothermal projects that have showed interest that have kind of talked, but there’s been no paperwork filed at this moment,” the committee told the room.
Lake County has no energy element in its general plan. The ad hoc committee recommended writing one in June. The county’s draft energy strategy, presented to supervisors Oct. 6, doesn’t mention data centers. The board has introduced no data center item since.
The East Region Town Hall, another of the county’s municipal advisory councils, voted the night before to send the board a letter asking for a resolution that pauses permits for energy exploration, energy facilities and data centers inside its boundaries until the county adopts an area plan and an energy element, its chair, Angela Amaral, told the meeting. Owen said the letter went to the board that day and she hadn’t had time to read it.
What Mendocino did
Mendocino County’s supervisors didn’t wait for an inquiry. On Sept. 1 they adopted an urgency ordinance banning new data centers. On Oct. 6 they extended it by 22 months and 15 days, to Aug. 21, 2028, the most state law allows, on a 4-1 vote. The ordinance names no applicant. It says only that local governments nationwide have received inquiries and applications for data centers, and that the county anticipates receiving them.
The extension carved out one exception. Facilities drawing less than 3 megawatts aren’t covered. Supervisor Ted Williams said 3 megawatts would allow “a data center the size of a shipping container.” Supervisor Maureen Mulheren cast the no vote, calling a threshold worked out over lunch “not fully developed.”