Good News for the California Solar Industry
California Approves License for 250-mw Solar Power Plant in Mojave Desert
“Today’s action begins the journey of increasing clean, renewable energy in California,” Energy Commission Chairwoman Karen Douglas said in a news release after the Aug. 25 decision. It is the largest single-site solar electricity project ever approved in the United States, but may soon be eclipsed by even larger power plants.
The company developing the project has estimated it would take 25 months to build the plant after a license is received. During the construction period, an average of about 475 construction workers at a time would be employed, with a peak number near 1,000, NextEra Energy Resources, the parent company of Beacon Solar, said in a description of the project on its website. Once operational, the plant is expected to provide 60 to 70 permanent jobs.
Ms. Douglas served as the presiding member of the committee that reviewed the plant’s application for certification. In a unanimous vote, the Energy Commission adopted the presiding member’s proposed decision, which recommended licensing the project in the Fremont Valley in eastern Kern County.
The last solar thermal power plants that the Energy Commission approved were the Luz Solar Electric Generating Systems IX and Luz SEGS X in February 1990. Those plants were to be part of a series of 12 making up the world’s largest solar generating system, also in the Mojave Desert. Nine were built, clustered at several sites ranging from about 15 to 65 miles from the Beacon Solar location. The combined peak capacity of all nine plants, seven of which are owned by Florida-based NextEra Energy Resources, is 353.8 megawatts. The seven owned by NextEra Energy have a total capacity of 310 mw.
The Energy Commission concluded that the Beacon Solar Energy Project, with recommended mitigation measures adopted, will have no significant impacts on the environment and complies with applicable laws, ordinances, regulations and standards. The decision “was based solely on the record of facts that were established during the facility’s certification proceeding,” the commission said.
Beacon Solar plans to construct, own and operate the proposed plant. The project will be a concentrated solar thermal-electric generating plant on about 2,012 privately owned acres in eastern Kern County on the western edge of the Mojave Desert, 4 miles north of California City and about 85 miles north of Los Angeles by air.
Like the solar plants last approved in 1990, the project will use parabolic trough technology to produce electrical power.
A description of the project on NextEra’s website says concentrated sunlight reflected from parabolic mirrors will heat a synthetic oil, which will be used to boil water to create steam. The steam is to be piped to a turbine generator, which will produce electricity. The solar thermal technology will provide all the power generated by the plant, but two auxiliary natural-gas-fired boilers are to be used to reduce startup times and protect the synthetic oil from freezing in winter in the relatively high-altitude Mojave.
The high use of water required for some solar thermal power plants has been an issue in the Southwest. For cooling, which is the primary water usage, this plant will use treated recycled water from California City or the Rosamond Community Sanitary District, according to the Energy Commission. The project is expected to use about 1,400 acre-feet per year of recycled water for cooling and 153 acre-feet per year of groundwater from wells for washing mirrors or for employee use.
A high-voltage power line that runs alongside State Route 14 through part of the Fremont Valley is not far from the site of the Beacon Solar Energy Project. A Los Angeles Department of Water and Power substation is about 1.5 miles from the site and is to be the interconnection point. A contract has not yet been signed for the electricity to be generated by the plant, which the company has estimated could be enough to supply the annual needs of as many as 88,000 California households.
The developer describes the site as “private, previously used, fallow, non-prime agricultural land.”