Ziad Alaywan knows how to build an empire.

Alaywan was one of the first employees of the California Independent System Operator, a nonprofit corporation that now runs the power grid for most of the state, overseeing 900 power plants and 26,000 miles of transmission lines that serve 30 million customers. Alaywan helped launch the system operator, then left in 2005 to found ZGlobal Inc., an engineering and energy firm. He set up shop in Folsom, near Sacramento, where the system operator is also based.

ZGlobal secured its first contract with the Imperial Irrigation District in November 2005. The $49,950 agreement called for ZGlobal to advise the publicly owned utility — which provides electricity and water in California’s southeastern corner — on a proposed 85-mile transmission line. ZGlobal’s contract with IID was extended three times, growing in value to $1,119,500.

Since then, IID has increasingly relied on ZGlobal, giving the consultant 15 contracts that will collectively pay as much as $18 million. ZGlobal has analyzed proposed power lines, helped craft IID’s energy strategy and represented the utility in communications with state and national regulators.

The consultant’s work has helped determine how much money developers must pay to connect their solar farms to IID’s grid, and in some cases whether their projects can get built at all.

ZGlobal has also worked as a consultant for some of those solar developers.

Over the last few years, ZGlobal has helped private companies develop nearly a dozen solar farms in Imperial County — some of which sell electricity to IID, and some of which have connected to IID’s grid in order to sell electricity to other utilities. ZGlobal’s work for IID has put the firm in a position where it could advise the utility to spend public money in ways that could ultimately benefit ZGlobal and its private-sector clients.

In fact, ZGlobal advised IID officials on decisions that affected at least three solar farms being developed by ZGlobal clients — one of a number of potential conflicts between the public mission of IID and the private interests of ZGlobal, a yearlong investigation by The Desert Sun has found. Our findings include:

ZGlobal has worked on seven Imperial County solar projects developed by Green Light Energy Corp. — a company that shares offices and representatives with ZGlobal across more than a dozen limited liability companies, an exhaustive review of public records shows;

As a consultant for IID, ZGlobal conducted engineering studies for two solar projects originally developed by Green Light and a third solar project being developed by a ZGlobal client, public records show. Those studies help determine how much money developers must pay to connect their projects to IID’s grid;

ZGlobal advised IID to build the Midway-Bannister transmission line, which cost the utility $9.4 million. Midway-Bannister made possible the construction of one Green Light solar farm and one other solar farm on which ZGlobal consulted for the developer;

Several power purchase contracts for Green Light solar projects were presented to IID’s board of directors for approval by an IID employee whose son worked for ZGlobal;

In late 2015, IID placed five senior Energy Department employees on paid administrative leave and hired more expensive ZGlobal employees to replace them, giving ZGlobal a three-year, $9.1-million consulting contract for the work. A few days earlier, IID had hired Vicken Kasarjian away from ZGlobal to co-manage the utility’s Energy Department.

ZGlobal’s growing role at IID has concerned some Imperial Valley residents, who worry that the more public money flows to ZGlobal, the harder it will be for IID to keep electricity rates low. IID offers some of the cheapest electricity in California, which helps the utility’s low-income, largely Latino customers in the Imperial Valley and eastern Coachella Valley stay cool during the desert’s sweltering summers without breaking the bank.

ZGlobal employees working for IID “have different interests than we do. They’re trying to make money,” said Shorty Hickingbotton, a longtime member of IID’s Energy Consumers Advisory Committee, who moved to the Imperial Valley in 1954 at age 16. “That’s why the people own the Imperial Irrigation District’s power department — we can maintain low rates.”

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RELATED: Ties between Green Light, ZGlobal raise questions about financial conflicts

The Desert Sun has reviewed thousands of pages of documents, many of them obtained under the California Public Records Act, and interviewed dozens of people about IID’s relationship with ZGlobal — some of whom believe ZGlobal has violated California’s conflict-of-interest law. The law says elected officials, public employees and private contractors working for government agencies “shall not be financially interested in any contract made by them in their official capacity.”

That means ZGlobal is prohibited from using its position as a government agent to participate in the making of public contracts that could benefit ZGlobal financially.

Alaywan, ZGlobal’s founder and president, denied having any conflicts of interest. He told The Desert Sun he’s always acted in the best interests of IID and its customers, saying he’s “done a lot” for the Imperial Valley by bringing solar developers to the region and helping IID make smart investments that keep rates low.

“I have brought a lot of work for them, I have brought a lot of projects,” Alaywan said. “For us, this is not just a job. There is something called social justice in this.”

“People think I’m building an empire behind all this,” Alaywan added.

IID officials say ZGlobal’s work has benefited ratepayers. At a February board meeting, an IID staffer gave a presentation on the consultant’s recent work for the utility, saying ZGlobal had analyzed or modified dozens of transmission projects, eliminated a backlog of unfinished work and cleaned up faulty data critical to the operation of the power grid.

“I’ve seen nothing from ZGlobal but an outstanding work product, and I wouldn’t change a thing,” Kevin Kelley, IID’s general manager, said in a recent interview.

IID officials said none of ZGlobal's work for the utility has violated the state’s conflict-of-interest law. Still, IID adopted a new conflict-of-interest policy this year in response to concerns about ZGlobal. The policy says consultants under contract at IID can’t also work for private-sector companies seeking to do business with the utility — the exact position ZGlobal was in for years.

Frank Oswalt, IID’s general counsel, discussed the new policy at a March board of directors meeting. He also told the board that ZGlobal had ended its business relationships with “17 or 18 other clients who have done or potentially do business in Imperial County or in our service area” to dispel concerns about conflicts of interest.

At a public agency like IID, Oswalt told the board at the time, “You’re constrained to operate in a manner to avoid any kind of a conflict where ZGlobal — or any consultant, for that matter — could on the one hand advise the IID, and on the other hand represent a potential outside vendor, or do work for them on a consulting basis. That, under the law, creates a conflict.”

Oswalt has his own prior relationship with ZGlobal.

For several years, ZGlobal housed its Imperial Valley office at a building in the city of Imperial. ZGlobal leased the space from Oswalt and his wife, who owned the building from 2007 through 2015, public records show, before Oswalt became IID’s general counsel.

“When the lease was up they moved,” Oswalt said when questioned by The Desert Sun. “I begged them to — well, I didn’t beg them, but I talked to them and asked them to stay.”

But they didn’t stay. Now, Oswalt says his financial relationship with ZGlobal is “in the past.”

The Imperial Irrigation District is better known for water than for energy. The utility controls the single largest share of Colorado River water, 3.1 million acre-feet. IID supplies that water to the Imperial Valley farms that produce roughly two-thirds of America’s winter vegetables.

IID was formed in 1911 and got into the energy business in the 1930s, when it realized it could generate hydropower along the All-American Canal, which brings Colorado River water to the California desert. In 1934, IID struck a deal with the Coachella Valley Water District that gave IID exclusive rights to provide power not only in the Imperial Valley, but also in the eastern Coachella Valley. IID now sells electricity in the Coachella Valley cities of Coachella, Indio and La Quinta, as well as several unincorporated areas of Riverside County.

Over the last few years, ZGlobal has quickly made a mark on the century-old utility.

Jesse Montaño — a former IID employee who now runs ZGlobal’s Imperial Valley office and is the firm’s vice president of strategic planning — has become a regular presence at IID board meetings, often presenting proposed expenditures to the board for approval. ZGlobal has played a critical role in IID’s legal battle against the California Independent System Operator, the grid operator Alaywan helped found. In 2013, ZGlobal advised IID’s energy manager on an Energy Department restructuring. The consultant has lobbied state and federal officials on IID’s behalf.

ZGlobal has worked for several California utilities and government entities, including Anaheim Public Utilities, where ZGlobal does after-hours energy scheduling, and Marin Clean Energy in the Bay Area, where the consultant provides scheduling and other services. ZGlobal also provides reliability services to the Southwest Reserve Sharing Group, a collective of 15 utilities.

But the consultant only has one office outside its headquarters in Folsom.

ZGlobal’s Imperial Valley office, on Main Street in El Centro, is nondescript on the outside and impressive on the inside. Visitors are greeted by a waterfall bearing the name “ZGLOBAL” under a high ceiling featuring wooden beams. The office’s back wall is exposed brick, leftover from the historic Barbara Worth Hotel, which burned down half a century ago.

Upstairs, ZGlobal employees monitor screens in a high-tech control room, scheduling electricity transactions for clients. Montaño said the company employs 16 people in the Imperial Valley.

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Most of ZGlobal’s work for IID has involved the utility’s grid: 1,400 miles of power lines, two dozen substations and other infrastructure that carries electrons across the region.

IID has long supported the development of solar and geothermal power plants. Imperial County has powerful solar and geothermal resources, and IID officials believe they can boost their revenues by charging developers to send the new electricity through their grid. ZGlobal has been central to those efforts, advising IID on where to build power lines and helping the utility address conflicts with the state grid operator that may limit its ability to export electricity to other parts of California, according to public documents and statements by utility officials.



ZGlobal has also worked on solar projects being developed by Green Light Energy Corp. — a company that shares offices and representatives with ZGlobal across more than a dozen limited liability companies, most of which are managed or owned by Alaywan. ZGlobal has worked on at least seven Green Light solar projects in Imperial County, based on public records, media accounts and information on ZGlobal’s website.

Green Light was the initial developer of the 50-megawatt Seville solar farm in western Imperial County, which sells electricity to IID, and the 150-megawatt Solar Gen 2 project in Calipatria, which connects to IID’s grid. ZGlobal “performed all engineering, permitting, project development and operations activities” for those projects, according to the consultant’s website. ZGlobal also consulted for the developers of the 107-megawatt Midway solar farm in Calipatria and the 20-megawatt Sol Orchard project in El Centro, both of which sell electricity to IID.

READ MORE: Ties between Green Light, ZGlobal raise questions about financial conflicts

Some of ZGlobal’s work for IID has directly affected Green Light solar farms.

In at least two cases, ZGlobal studied the impacts to IID’s grid of solar farms originally developed by Green Light. As part of its consulting work for IID, ZGlobal conducted a facilities study for Green Light’s Valencia 1 project and a facilities study and a system impact study for the Imperial Water Ventures project, on which Green Light was the original developer. (Green Light sold that project to a company led by former IID board member Mike Abatti.) ZGlobal was the “operating representative” for both projects, according to contracts IID signed in 2014 and 2015 to buy energy from the solar farms.

Those studies, which are required for new energy generators, show how the safety and reliability of the grid would be impacted by the additional electricity flowing through the wires and what infrastructure needs to be upgraded as a result. Crucially, the studies help determine how much the upgrades will cost — and how the developer and IID will divide those costs between them.

Asked if it was appropriate for ZGlobal to study Green Light projects for IID, Alaywan initially said he didn’t think ZGlobal had studied those particular projects. Told later that the information about ZGlobal having done the studies came from IID, Alaywan declined to comment further.

ZGlobal also conducted a facilities study and a system impact study for a planned 30-megawatt addition to the Midway solar project. Alaywan told The Desert Sun that ZGlobal has worked both for Midway’s current developer, Solar Frontier, and for its former developer, 8minutenergy.

A few years before ZGlobal conducted those studies, IID had paid the consultant to study the proposed Midway-Bannister power line. According to ZGlobal’s website, the firm “performed cost benefit analysis, project justification studies and analyzed potential rate impacts,” before recommending that IID build the power line. IID ultimately built the first phase of Midway-Bannister, spending $9.4 million in public money.

Since Midway-Bannister came online in 2011, two solar farms that ZGlobal helped develop have hooked up to the power line: Sonora, which is part of the Solar Gen 2 project originally developed by Green Light, and Midway, for which ZGlobal was a consultant. The Midway-Bannister line made those projects possible, allowing them to hook up to IID’s power grid and sell the electricity they generate.

Alaywan said his recommendation that IID build the Midway-Bannister power line, and his subsequent work for solar companies that connected to that line, was “absolutely not” a problem. He said he advised IID to build Midway-Bannister because he knew developers were willing to connect to the line and pay fees to IID for its use, meaning the economics made sense for the utility.

“It’s a win-win situation,” Alaywan said. “I am sort of independent from the outcome, because I get paid regardless of whether the generator interconnects or not.”

Three energy generators have hooked up to Midway-Bannister, an IID spokesperson said: Sonora solar, Midway solar and the Featherstone geothermal plant. In addition to working on the two solar farms, ZGlobal has consulted for EnergySource, the company that built and owns the Featherstone geothermal plant, according to Alaywan.

When Midway-Bannister opened in 2011, IID officials hailed the power line as a boon for the Imperial Valley’s geothermal industry.

The new power line “is just the beginning of our work to create a new industry that will change our future,” then-IID board president Stella Mendoza said in a statement at the time. “I look forward to working with the private sector on future projects that will not only help deliver green energy to outside markets, but will deliver the future of the place so many of us call home.”

According to Alaywan, ZGlobal worked as a consultant for Solar Frontier, which developed the Midway solar farm, which connected to Midway-Bannister. At an IID board of directors meeting in January, ZGlobal’s Montaño — acting in his capacity as an IID consultant — advised the board to waive between a quarter-million and half a million dollars in fees Solar Frontier had agreed to pay IID if it fell behind schedule building the Midway project. Montaño said some of the delays were out of Solar Frontier’s control. The board later followed Montaño’s advice, refunding more than $250,000.

Alaywan and Montaño declined to answer an emailed question about the waived fees. In an earlier interview, Alaywan said ZGlobal’s ongoing three-year contract with IID prohibits the ZGlobal employees assigned to IID from working for other clients, creating an “internal wall” that separates the company's IID and non-IID work.

It’s unclear if ZGlobal was still working for Solar Frontier when the fees were waived.

IID and ZGlobal were also linked by a family tie.

On several occasions, contracts for Green Light solar projects were presented to IID’s board of directors for approval by Jamie Asbury, an IID employee whose son worked for ZGlobal. Among the contracts Asbury presented to the board were agreements to buy energy from four projects originally developed by Green Light: Valencia 1, Valencia 2, Imperial Water Ventures and Seville, according to board meeting documents.

The contracts were all approved. Once all four projects are built, the electricity will cost IID about $7 million annually.

Asbury presented those contracts to the board while her son, Cameron Bucher, worked as a business and regulatory affairs manager for ZGlobal, according to his LinkedIn profile. Bucher did work for ZGlobal on the Seville project, public records show. He also used to work for IID.

Asbury told The Desert Sun she didn’t negotiate any of the four contracts in question, and that it wasn’t unusual for her to present contracts she hadn’t worked on personally to the board, due to her role as IID’s deputy energy manager for business and regulatory affairs. (She’s since moved to a job in IID’s legal department.) Asbury said her son wasn’t an owner of any of the parties to those contracts, and that she never worked with him directly when he was employed by ZGlobal.

“It never occurred to me that it would be problematic,” Asbury said. She added that the power purchase agreements for Valencia 1, Valencia 2 and Imperial Water Ventures were signed under IID’s feed-in tariff, a state-mandated program that requires utilities to buy electricity from small solar farms at predetermined prices.

Asbury’s son, Bucher, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

While it’s hard to say how much money ZGlobal’s private-sector clients have made by building solar projects that connect to IID’s grid, three of those projects have been sold to Fortune 500 energy companies.

The Solar Gen 2 project was bought in 2014 by Southern Company, which is based in Atlanta. The Seville solar farm was acquired a year later by North-Carolina-based Duke Energy. (Green Light was the original developer of both projects, but didn’t make either sale itself; after working on the early stages of development for Solar Gen 2 and Seville, it sold them to other companies.) Part of the Midway solar farm, on which ZGlobal consulted for the developers, was bought by Virginia-based Dominion Energy this year.

ZGlobal’s relationship with IID has alarmed Arn Lahde, a management consultant who has worked for IID, Westinghouse, Walt Disney Imagineering and other companies, and who has gotten to know IID employees. Lahde has described ZGlobal’s work for IID as a “working both sides of the street” situation, in which ZGlobal manages work for IID that could benefit energy projects being developed by ZGlobal’s private-sector clients.

Mike Morgan, an Imperial Valley farmer and longtime critic of IID’s water policies, filed a complaint against the utility with California’s Fair Political Practices Commission, alleging conflicts of interest involving ZGlobal and several IID officials. The commission rejected the complaint because it didn’t contain enough information, a spokesperson said.

“Conflicted (consultants) like this won’t just loot you nickels and dimes and tens of thousands of dollars — they can really disrupt the whole place,” Morgan said in an interview.

The goal of California’s conflict-of-interest law, Government Code Section 1090, is to eliminate even the opportunity for elected officials, public employees and private contractors working for government agencies to benefit themselves using public money, said Roy Hanley, a partner at the law firm Hanley & Fleishman. Hanley has written about Section 1090 and served as city attorney for several California cities.

“This statute’s been around well over a century basically, and it stems from the idea that if you’re going to work for the public, you can only have one master — you don’t work both ends of a deal,” Hanley said. “If you’re a public official or employee as defined in the code, then you have to very strictly make sure you only work for the public interest, and not your own.”

Alaywan said ZGlobal has never used its work for IID to enrich itself or its private-sector clients. He said he introduced several companies that have built solar farms in Imperial County to the region, including Regenerate Power, Solar Frontier and 8minutenergy.

“We have worked with every developer that connects to IID, virtually everyone,” Alaywan said.

Alaywan said much of ZGlobal’s work for solar developers began between early 2009 and early 2013, during which time the consultant didn’t sign any contracts with IID.

“During that gap was when we were able to open an office in Imperial and focus on non-IID work, and we brought in a lot of investors. We told them it was a good place to invest money, we told them how. And some of the investors relied heavily on us,” Alaywan said. “We were the owner’s engineers (for their energy projects), we were doing everything on their behalf.”

ZGlobal signed one of its last consulting contracts with IID before the gap described by Alaywan in March 2009. While it’s unclear when ZGlobal did its last work for IID under that deal, the $180,000-contract was written to last through February 2012, covering much of the period during which Alaywan said ZGlobal started working for solar developers.

In October 2015, ZGlobal took on its most prominent role at IID yet.

That month, Kevin Kelley, IID’s general manager, made an announcement: He was putting several Energy Department employees on paid administrative leave, effective immediately. Five senior engineers were affected. Four days later, IID’s board of directors replaced those engineers with ZGlobal contractors, agreeing to pay ZGlobal $9.1 million over three years for transmission, engineering and planning services.

As part of that contract, ZGlobal committed to providing six full-time employees to IID in the Imperial Valley — to be paid rates ranging from $130 to $335 per hour. The hourly pay of the ousted employees had ranged from roughly $65 to $95 per hour, according to publicly available salary data and information obtained from IID under the California Public Records Act.

The same week Kelley pushed out the five engineers, IID’s board met in closed session to hire a new employee to lead the utility’s Energy Department. IID’s new energy manager for transmission and planning would be Vicken Kasarjian, who had worked at ZGlobal immediately prior. Kasarjian would co-manage the department alongside existing energy manager Carl Stills.

A few months later, Kelley reassigned Stills to another role, leaving Kasarjian in charge of IID’s Energy Department, including his former ZGlobal colleagues. In August 2016, Stills retired.

Kasarjian rejected the idea that his hiring may have given ZGlobal too much influence at IID. He said he’d only worked for ZGlobal for five or six months, before which he’d been employed by the Sacramento Municipal Utilities District for a decade.

“The timing in my family life was such that I wanted to take on this opportunity” at IID, Kasarjian said in an interview.

Two of the five ousted employees are now suing IID: Tom King, the utility’s former deputy energy manger, and Paul Peschel, who managed the Energy Department’s planning and engineering team. A third former employee, Patrick Harner — who started work as an IID engineer in October 2015 and was fired two months later — has also sued, with the same attorney as King and Peschel.

All three men allege — among other charges, including age discrimination — that IID unfairly retaliated against them for raising concerns about ZGlobal’s growing role at the utility.

Peschel’s lawsuit says he brought his concerns to IID and was put on paid administrative leave shortly afterward. King’s lawsuit makes similar claims. Harner’s lawsuit says he was fired after complaining to his supervisors that the ZGlobal contractors hired to replace the five ousted employees were “younger, cheaper, did not require employment benefits as contractors, and lacked the knowledge and proper certification to be doing the jobs for which IID hired them.”

King was eventually fired. Peschel retired from IID and is now general manager of the Kings River Conservation District in California’s San Joaquin Valley. The attorney representing King, Peschel and Harner didn’t respond to phone calls seeking comment.

Kelley declined to comment on the lawsuits. But in legal filings in Riverside and Imperial counties, IID has denied many of the former employees’ claims, arguing that they haven’t provided evidence of age discrimination or other illegal activity by IID, that five of the eight ZGlobal consultants who ultimately replaced them are older than 40, and that the utility had good reason to put them on paid leave. IID also says Harner was fired during a one-year probationary period, during which he could be fired without cause.

The three lawsuits also claim, in similar language, that the public “has suffered a significant increase in its utility costs through IID because of IID’s improper relationship with Z-Global.” IID has not specifically addressed that claim in its legal filings.

The staffing changes sparked a backlash.

At a meeting of IID’s Energy Consumers Advisory Committee, Mark Weber — a citizen representative of La Quinta, a city in the eastern Coachella Valley — said the loss of so many longtime employees could destabilize the Energy Department. Weber criticized IID for not giving the committee a full explanation, especially since it’s the only place where Coachella Valley residents are represented at the utility. Most of IID’s energy sales come in the Coachella Valley, but only Imperial County residents in IID’s water service territory can vote for members of the board of directors.

“When you have a number of employees that are worried about their jobs, when you have five senior execs in the electric division being essentially terminated without being notified why — and it drags on for several months, and it appears that there’s a plan in place — then it’s of concern to the ratepayers in this area,” Weber said at a January 2016 committee meeting.

In response to the public outcry, Ross Simmons, IID’s general counsel at the time, released a memo explaining why the five engineers were put on leave. In the April 2016 document, Simmons said the decision was made “based on the general manager’s and my view that the IID’s Transmission Planning Unit’s dysfunction was pervasive and exigent, and the Energy Department management had not taken corrective action.”

That view was based in part on information provided to IID management by ZGlobal — meaning ZGlobal’s analysis of IID employees contributed to IID’s decision to get rid of those employees, and ultimately to give ZGlobal a $9.1-million contract to replace them.

In a legal filing responding to Harner’s lawsuit, IID said it hired ZGlobal in late 2014 to determine the cause of a dispute with the California Independent System Operator. IID management feared that if the dispute was not resolved, the utility’s autonomy would be threatened, potentially leading to electricity rate increases in the Imperial Valley.

In December 2014, IID said in the legal filing, ZGlobal identified serious data errors by the five senior engineers, “including reliance on outdated, inaccurate information in violation of” regional guidelines. ZGlobal concluded that the engineers were “wholly incompetent, allowing improper studies to threaten IID’s (autonomy).” That conclusion, along with a later assessment by a different consultant, informed Kelley’s decision to put the senior engineers on paid administrative leave, IID said.

ZGlobal also played a role in IID’s decision to fire Harner.

Harner started working at IID in October 2015, a few days before the utility replaced the senior engineers with ZGlobal. But his tenure was brief. In a legal filing responding to Harner’s lawsuit, IID says Montaño — one of the ZGlobal consultants brought in on the three-year contract — assessed the Energy Department’s staff and was “surprised by (Harner’s) lack of experience” in the type of work he’d been hired to do a few months earlier, which involved working with the California Independent System Operator.

Montaño shared his assessment of Harner’s qualifications with Kasarjian, the utility’s new co-energy manager and a former ZGlobal employee, according to IID’s legal filing. Kasarjian made the decision to fire Harner, IID said in the filing.

In a recent interview, Simmons said it was “not inappropriate” for IID to replace the five senior engineers with ZGlobal, even after the consultant’s input had contributed to their ouster.

“Under all the circumstances that we were facing at that time, I’m very comfortable with the decision that was made, the premise on which it was made, and then hiring ZGlobal in that context,” Simmons said.

Kelley said ZGlobal’s three-year, $9.1-million contract was “never intended to last longer” than its October 2018 expiration date, and that the consultant is training IID employees to run the utility’s transmission planning unit when the contract ends.

“If I had it to do over again, I’d do it the same way,” Kelley said.

At the March 2017 board of directors meeting where Oswalt, IID’s general counsel, introduced the utility’s new conflict-of-interest policy, he also said members of the public had raised concerns about what they contended were two potential conflicts connected to ZGlobal.

One of the potential conflicts, Oswalt said, involved IID’s plan to expand its battery storage facility, which ZGlobal helped build as a subcontractor for Coachella Energy Storage Partners, or CESP. CESP had proposed a $5.3-million expansion, and ZGlobal’s Montaño — in his capacity as an IID consultant — had discussed the merits of that proposal at a January 2017 meeting of IID’s board of directors. In response to a board member’s question about how the battery expansion would be paid for, Montaño said IID’s investment would be paid off within five or six years.

Two months later, Oswalt told the board that IID should put the battery expansion out to bid rather than negotiating a contract with CESP, due to ZGlobal’s work on the original battery.

After a public bidding process, CESP’s expansion proposal was chosen as the winner. An IID spokesperson said it was the lowest-cost bid.

Alaywan and Montaño declined to answer emailed questions about the battery expansion.

READ MORE:For a $35-million battery, IID turned to a former board member — after rejecting 3 cheaper offers

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The other potential conflict mentioned by Oswalt in March involved IID’s plan for a community solar program, in which homes that can’t afford rooftop solar are given the opportunity to buy electricity generated by a local solar farm. IID had started negotiating a contract with Regenerate Power, which would build the community solar plant.

But there was a problem, Oswalt said: IID had asked Alaywan for his input on the contract negotiations, and Alaywan owned the property, known as Allegretti Ranch, where Regenerate wanted to build its solar project. Once that was discovered, Oswalt said, Alaywan agreed to sell the ranch to avoid a potential conflict. And to be safe, IID would solicit competitive bids for a community solar farm, rather than keep negotiating with Regenerate.

Alaywan’s ownership of the ranch wasn’t ZGlobal’s only connection to Regenerate’s planned community solar farm. A state business filing from October 2016 shows that Melissa Vaa, a longtime ZGlobal employee, was the registered agent for the Regenerate subsidiary that was supposed to build the solar plant.

Alaywan said he didn’t do anything wrong when he advised IID on the Regenerate negotiations. He said he would have been better off financially had he advised IID not to sign a contract with Regenerate, since then the developer wouldn’t have exercised its fixed-price option to buy the land from him — and he would’ve been able to sell it to someone else for a higher price.

In May, Oswalt told the board of directors that about 10 companies had submitted bids to build a community solar farm for IID. Oswalt said Regenerate Power had made the strongest offer. He asked the board for authorization to negotiate a power purchase contract for Regenerate’s planned 60-megawatt solar project at Allegretti Ranch, which Alaywan says he no longer owns.

Board members gave their blessing. Two months later, they approved a 20-year power purchase contract with Titan Solar 1, LLC, the Regenerate subsidiary that will build the solar farm. IID will pay $2.5 million annually for the electricity the facility generates.

Titan Solar 1’s most recent state business filing is still the October 2016 document that lists a ZGlobal employee as the company’s registered agent.

Sammy Roth writes about energy and the environment for The Desert Sun. He can be reached at sammy.roth@desertsun.com, (760) 778-4622 and @Sammy_Roth.