Tag Archives: Genesis

Riverside County passes on $700,000 renewable energy development grant

Posted: April 29th, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: The Green Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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It’s rare for any county in California to turn down the opportunity to score $700,000 in state grant money to help update its general plan or other renewable energy permitting regulations, but that appears to be what Riverside County has done.

A request for proposals issued March 11 announced up to $7 million in state money available to counties “to fund plans for the development or revisions of rules and policies that facilitate the development of eligible renewable energy resources, and their associated electric transmission facilities, and the processing of permits for eligible renewable energy resources.”

The deadline for applications was April 10, and five counties applied, San Bernardino, Los Angeles, Inyo, Imperial and San Luis Obispo.  All have tentatively been awarded funds, ranging from $603,000 to $700,000 — the maximum amount available to anyone county – according to an announcement released April 25.

I checked in with Andrew Ferrin, the grants and loan officer at the Energy Commission, who confirmed that Riverside County did not submit an application for the money. I also asked if, given that less than half of the available $7 million had been awarded if there would be subsequent opportunities to apply for the money.

He was unsure. The law under which the money was offered was for the 2012-2013 fiscal year, he said.

I am waiting to hear from Riverside County officials on why they didn’t submit an application. As some of you may remember, the county has spent more than $869,293.15 on implementing its regulations on solar permitting — including its $450-er-acres solar fee passed in November of 2011.

All of the funds spent to date have come from a $600,000 per year solar franchise fee it is receiving from the 550-megawatt Desert Sunlight project now under construction on public land in the eastern county.

First Solar employees work on putting up the steel posts and rails to support solar panels on Nov. 29, 2011 in Desert Center.At least some of that money was supposed to go to the tiny town of Desert Center, located a few miles from Desert Sunlight and very much feeling the impacts of solar development.

Instead, county officials have dedicated the Desert Sunlight money to implementing the solar fee policy and defending it against a law suit two solar industry groups filed against it in February 2012.

Given that, it may be the county just didn’t have any use for the money. Another county missing from the tentative awards list is Kern County, which developed its own solar policies without having to dip into any fees it has raised from solar developers, all of which are earmarked for specific uses in the county.

In the meantime, I will be heading out to the east county on Thursday for a media tour of both Desert Sunlight and the 250-megawatt Genesis solar project, both owned by NextEra Energy and both located on public land in the Riverside East solar zone between Joshua Tree National Park and the city of Blythe.

 

We got a gig! California solar takes the edge off peak energy demand

Posted: September 4th, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: The Green Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
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The impact of California’s utility-scale solar projects — 1 megawatt and up — helped the state get through its recent heat wave by pumping a full gigawatt of power into the grid.

The California Independent System Operator – which manages the grid — announced the high point today,  saying that three days in recent weeks, large-scale solar in the state reached the 1 gigawatt mark or higher.

One gigawatt is 1,000 megawatts, and 1 megawatt can power about 750 houses — so one gig is 750,000 houses.

The ISO is claiming that’s a new national record for solar production.

“The beauty of solar power is it comes when you need it the most,” said Stephanie McCorkle, the ISO’s director of communication. ”Right at that air-conditioning rush hour, typically we see the peak of solar.”

The Coachella Valley did its bit — with Solar Power Inc.’s 2.2 megawatt project in North Palm Springs pumping its electrons into the grid, according to Mike Anderson, a company spokesman.

What we don’t know is how much power smaller, roof-top solar installations have been generating on the local level — also taking strain off the grid because those houses are not needing extra power during peak hours. The ISO does’t track that, McCorkle said.

While 1 gigawatt is impressive, it’s still a relatively small percentage of total power demand. On Friday, solar power hit 1.076 gigawatts, but the peak demand was 40.5 gigawatts, McCorkle said, meaning solar made up 2.6 percent of power on the grid.

Think about how much power might be generated once projects such as the 550-megawatt Desert Sunlight or 250-megawatt Genesis projects now under construction east of the Coachella Valley come on line.

We’ll be lighting up and cooling off the state — or at least a good chunk of it.

 

 

Mitigation meditation — the solar trade-offs

Posted: May 15th, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: The Green Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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I have been meditating recently on the word “mitigation.” It is a word often used in environmental impact reports for large-scale solar projects, such as the 150-megawatt Desert Harvest project being planned for 1,000-1,200 acres of open desert five miles north of Desert Center.

Basically, what the environmental impact report is is 2,000-plus pages documenting the impacts of putting a massive solar farm in the desert, followed by plans to mitigate said impacts.

The dictionary definition of mitigate, from Merriam-Webster is (1) to cause to less harsh or hostile, mollify; (2) to make less severe or painful, alleviate or extenuate. Extenuate is, of course, an interesting word in and of itself. It means to lessen or to try to lessen the seriousness or extent of by making partial excuses.

So, when it comes to lessening the impacts of solar, it seems there are two basic classes of mitigations — direct, onsite actions andindirect, offsite actions.

In the direct, onsite mitigations, we have what companies do to lessen dust and other air pollution caused by construction. So the EIR for Desert Harvest shows that construction will cause a range of air pollution — carbon monoxide, particulate matter and nitrous oxide – above standards set by the South Coast Air Quality Management District. The project developer, enXco, will be required to implement a range of mitigations, frompaving roads leading to the project site; ensuring construction equipment is turned off when not in use, rather than sitting around idling; keeping soil loads 18 inches below the rim of trucks and limiting speeds on unpaved roads to 15 miles per hour.

Not perfect, but definitely lessened — an appropriate use of the word mitigation.

When we get to habitat, plants and animals, things start falling more into the extenuating side 0f the definition, because the main form of mitigation for habitat destruction is buying other land to offset the loss.

Thus, for the destruction of desert plants and soils on site, the BLM lists six mitigations, ranging from having an onsite biologist to monitor construction, educating workers about the site’s flora and fauna, the relevant regulations and their responsibilities for complying with  them and a vegetation management plan.

But, the reports says, “Note that all disturbances to soils and vegetation are analyzed here as long-term and permanent impacts and off-site compensation is required.”

Which gets us to the sixth mitigation, which is how much land the company will have to buy to compensate for the loss of the 1,000-1,200 acres the project may destroy. For plants, the compensation ratio runs for 1 to 1, for creosote bush scrub lands to 3 to 1 for desert dry wash woodland, which is classified as a special-status plant community because of its role in the desert’s natural water system.

This is a bit of a shell game, moving plants and animals to other sites or just protecting other, similar sites. It’s a trade-off, and different people have different views on whether or not it’s one they find appropriate and worthwhile. 

Translocation is tricky. For example, the report notes that while efforts could be made to take out and replant any Emory crucifixion thorns, a sensitive plant found on the Desert Harvest site, there are no documented instances of this being done successfully. Another possibility would be planting greenhouse-raised plants on the compensation lands.

In fact, it would probably be better to use the word compensate – to counterbalance, or to make an appropriate, counterbalancing payment –in such cases. There is no true mitigation for destroying habitat that can take hundreds or thousands of years to regenerate.

Which brings me — in a not quite clean segue — to the meeting in Desert Center April 14 on the Desert Harvest draft EIR and Holly Roberts, a project manager for the Bureau of Land Management’s Palm Springs office.

Roberts is one of the unsung heroines of the local renewable energy community. She is enormously respected but tends to keep behind the scenes.

At the meeting, she started off the BLM’s presentation with a brief talk on the kinds of feedback the agency is looking for, which is, she said, substantive. 

“Question the BLM about the accuracy of its information or the adequacy of its process,” she said.

What doesn’t work are vague questions or complaining that a project is going to ruin the view from your patio, she said.

Roberts really believes that the process laid out for public comment periods  in the National Environmental Protection Act is an example of grassroots democracy at its best. She wants people to get right up in the BLM’s face and challenge the agency on its facts and methodology.

She pointed out that the Desert Sunlight project now under construction north of the proposed Desert Harvest site was first planned for 20,000 acres.

“Because of public comments, 16,000 acres were taken off the project,” she said.

Of course, there are limitations to this approach, as seen in the case of the archeological artifacts found at NextEra’s Genesis project, which my colleague Keith Matheny wrote about in today’s paper.

Tribal concerns and ways of protecting prehistoric desert sites containing archeological artifacts do not fit well with the kind of linear, factual quantifications required by federal and state laws. To them, the sites are sacred and anything in the ground should be left there, completely undisturbed.

The Desert Harvest site has two prehistoric sites that are listed on the National Registry of Historic Places, according to the draft EIR. Alfredo Figueroa, the one tribal representative at the Desert Center meeting, said he has not been on the site so could not comment on whatever might be out there.

All that said, we will now see what kind of comments the Desert Harvest draft EIR generates. All 2,000-plus pages of it are online on the BLM Palm Springs Field Office website. Hopefully, people will dig in, look at the analysis of impacts, mitigations and compensations and give the agency some comments to think about.

Make Holly Roberts happy. You have till July 18.

Solar thermal fights back; FedEx expands its electric fleet

Posted: March 6th, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: The Green Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Every day, 5,000 times more energy shines down on the Earth from the sun than it takes to power the entire world.

That enlightening factoid comes to us today from the solar industry’s newest trade group, the Concentrating Solar Power Alliance. CSP, as it is called in the industry, is what most of us call solar thermal — where panels or troughs collect or concentrate heat from the sun, which is then used to heat a liquid, create steam and run a generator.

Large-scale solar thermal projects have had a tough time in the past year, what with the pressure from falling photovoltaic panel prices and permitting challenges related to how much water they use.

In the Riverside East solar zone, the public land east of the Coachella Valley, three of the first four fast-track projects were originally solar thermal — Solar Millennium’s Blythe and Palen projects and NextEra Energy’s Genesis project.  As most local readers are aware, both Blythe and Palen are now on hold, presumably being retooled as PV plants by their new owner, solarhybrid.

Only the 250-megawatt Genesis project, now under construction, has remained solar thermal, and NextEra’s next project planned for the region, the 750-megawatt McCoy plant, is PV.

BrightSource, one of the three solar thermal companies behind the new organization, also has a local solar thermal project in the works, the 750-megawatt Rio Mesa plant on private land near Blythe.

Making the world a little more welcoming to solar thermal is where the new group comes in, building on the efforts of a new international organization, the World Solar Thermal Electricity Association. Both groups are clearly aimed at promoting the benefits of solar thermal technology to energy markets. 

While more expensive upfront, the alliance says that solar thermal plants are much more reliable than PV projects and produce power that can be stored to match peak energy demands.  Another plus, they can keep operating even when the sun is not shining. 

Solar thermal also produces more construction and permanent jobs than PV plants.  A 2006 study commissioned by the U.S. National Renewable Energy Lab for the Department of Energy found that a 100 megawatt solar thermal plant creates more than $600 million in impact to gross state output, ten times that of a fossil fuel plant due to the local content and job creation.

With PV clearly the technology of choice right now, and panel prices continuing to move toward grid parity — it will be interesting to see  how CSPA will market itself and its projects.

In other breaking green tech news today, Smith Electric Vehicles of Kansas City, Mo.,  unveiled a new all-electric truck that FedEx will be adding to its fleet throughout the rest of the year.

FedEx put its first all-electric vehicles on the road in Los Angeles in March 2010.

The new FedEx electric vehicles will have a range of 100 miles on a single charge.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The new trucks will have a range of about 100 miles on a single charge, which makes them ideal for urban delivery routes.  Don’t know if we’ll see any in the valley, but hats off to FedEx for its ongoing efforts.

Cultural showdown at the Genesis solar project

Posted: February 24th, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: The Green Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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The discovery of what could be prehistoric tribal artifacts at NextEra’s  250-megawatt Genesis solar project in the Riverside East solar zone east of the Coachella Valley has sparked a potential standoff between Native American tribal groups on one side and the Bureau of Land Management and the solar developer on the other.

At issue is whether or not work on the solar thermal plant can continue in the area where the artifacts were found, even if it means NextEra might have to abandon the project all together.

The story starts in mid-November when crews grading land at the solar site found stone artifacts called metates and manos, which are prehistoric grinding tools, laying on a bed of charcoal, according to tribal officials.  BLM officials have called the find “unprecedented.”

Since then, the BLM has ordered all work stopped on a 200-acre area of the Genesis site and has been working on a plan that is supposed to ensure any significant archeological finds are preserved but will allow the project to continue.  Telephone conferences with stakeholders have also been held as the bureau has tried to hammer out a workable plan.

The details of exactly what was found and what has happened since the discovery have not been made public so far. NextEra files monthly status reports on the project with the California Energy Commission, but the sections on cultural resources were removed from both the November and December reports.

Steve Stengel, NextEra’s spokesman, laid out the company’s position in a statement recently emailed to The Desert Sun.

“During the permitting process for the Genesis Project, the involved agencies anticipated that Native American artifacts could be found during construction and an agreement was signed by two Native American Tribes that defines a process for respectfully treating the artifacts. While some artifacts have been found, no determination has been made that the artifacts are of a village or prehistoric site. At the request of the BLM, construction activities have been temporarily suspended on a small portion of the project site. The remainder of the site is under construction.”

Desert Sun photographer Richard Lui and I visited the Genesis site the end of January, when I asked NextEra officials point blank if any significant cultural artifacts had been found. They fudged the answer, first saying no, then adding that it would depend on who defined what a significant artifact is. They also did not tell us that the BLM had ordered grading stopped on a portion of the site.

At this point, the draft of the plan for handling the site and any artifacts is also confidential, but based on tribal letters raising concerns about it, the basic idea is that NextEra would be allowed to continue work on the site, using a method called controlled grading. That means trucks would continue to grade the land, but only about an inch down at a time, with the dirt sifted for any artifacts.

John Kalish, field manager at the BLM’s Palm Springs office, said Friday afternoon, the plan was close to approval, despite strong opposition from Native American tribes in the area.

Under agreements with the tribes that were required as part of the federal approval for the project, NextEra was supposed to notify them of any archeological finds on the Genesis site within 48 hours. The tribes are also supposed to be consulted on any further plans for handling of such sites.

According to two letters from the Colorado River Indian Tribes to the BLM, this has not happened. In a letter dated Jan. 19, Eldred Enas, chairman of the Colorado River tribes, said they had not been notified until almost two weeks after the find and they have repeatedly stated that they don’t want the site graded; they consider it a spiritual site and they want it left alone.

In both letters they cite a number of agreements and protocols which state that site avoidance is the preferred mitigation process for cultural findings such as the ones at the Genesis site, unless it is unfeasible, which NextEra maintains it is. The plant itself is planned for about 2,000 acres, so cutting it down by 200 acres or more could mean no project. 

And because assessment of the site is being carried out primarily by NextEra consultants along with archeologists from the BLM and Energy Commission, Enas said the process may be inherently biased.

“While we do not doubt the integrity of these entities, we believe their interests naturally, and necessarily align with the Project’s continued development and completion. Tribal interests may lie elsewhere,” he wrote.

From the tribes’ point of view, he said, the discovery of the artifacts in and of itself makes the site sacred, and no further evaluation is needed to declare it off limits.

He asks for a much slower process to evaluate the site with a Colorado River tribes expert involved and with face-to-face meetings with BLM officials.

Obviously, this is a story that requires further research and reporting.  I will be talking more with NextEra, BLM  and tribal officials on Monday.

I will also be catching up on the status of the kit fox survey now underway, which is trying to find the reason for the recent outbreak of canine distemper among foxes on or near the Genesis site.  From October to December, seven kit foxes died from the disease — another unprecedented occurrence.

Solar studies: The good, the bad, etc.

Posted: February 10th, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: The Green Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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I’m not sure if it’s election year posturing – the renewable energy industry is lobbying Congress heavily to preserve key financial incentives such as the production tax credit – or a push back from the Solyndra bankruptcy, but it seems barely a day goes by without some solar study landing in my email box.

What’s clear is that advocates for solar and the green economy in general are positioning the sector as a job creator that, in California, is growing faster than other traditional industry sectors. How good or effective the studies are depends on how closely they reflect what’s really going on –- and provide useful information –- rather than trying to oversell the impact of green jobs or manipulate public perceptions.

In the latter category, we have a study released Thursday — with support from Vote Solar, a nonprofit promoting local policies that increase the number of solar installations — billed as a survey of public attitudes toward solar development.

What I found instead is a poll funded by a major solar corporation, BrightSource Energy, with softball questions designed to elicit desired answers.

Case in point, the first question in the poll asked participants if they  agree or disagree with the following statements:

“California’s deserts are a great resource. We should use parts of them to develop renewable energy projects. “

No surprise, 78.6 percent of respondents agreed, while only 15.6 percent disagreed and 5.8 percent were unsure or refused to answer.

Wonder what the answers would have been if the question had been phrased as follows:

“California’s deserts are a great resource, with incredible visual vistas and habitat for endangered and unique desert plants and animals. Should we put thousands of solar panels there or on previously disturbed land?”

Yes, that’s a loaded question looking for a specific answer, but serves the point.

The irony here is that of the major solar developers, BrightSource has been one of the few to place some of its projects on previously disturbed land – like the company’s 750-megawatt Rio Mesa project now in the works on private land near Blythe.

The study also tries to tip the balance of public opinion by linking solar development with the creation of “thousands of local construction jobs for two to three years, and . . . between 80 to 100 permanent operations and maintenance jobs.” Respondents were then asked if knowing that makes them more or less likely to support large-scale solar.

Once again, 73.4 percent came down on the more likely side, 10.5 percent less likely, 8.6 percent no difference and 7.5 percent unsure or refusing to answer.

Time for a reality check here — and another, more realistic study on solar industry jobs, from the Centers for Excellence, a research and analysis outfit that provides California’s community colleges with information aimed at aligning curriculum and programs with job market needs.

Also released Thursday, this study is based on surveys and interviews with large and small solar companies across the state, along with analysis of relevant community college programs.  The good news here is that solar jobs have been growing faster than the general job market.

The study found that the state’s 2,000 solar firms employ around 50,000 workers, with another 18,000 jobs expected by 2015 — a healthy 36 percent increase.  But, the study’s breakdown by region found Southern California growth rates lower, with 8 percent growth projected for 2012 and 19 percent by 2015.

Other sobering findings — for large-scale solar projects, contractors often bring in their own crews from out of state — as has happened at NextEra Energy’s Genesis project, a 250-megawatt solar thermal plant about half way between Desert Center and Blythe. 

When Desert Sun photographer Richard Lui and I visited the site last week, one of the first things we noticed was that almost all the pick-up trucks on site had Minnesota license plates, cause that’s where the general contractor is headquartered.  We were told about 50 people on the site were from Minnesota — though some had brought their families out and are now living here — and the balance of workers on the site came through union hiring halls in Riverside and Orange County. 

Another nifty factoid, solar installers tend to hire skilled trades people — electricians, roofers and plumbers – with solar skills, along with specifically trained solar installers.  No surprise then that many students in College of the Desert’s solar training programs have been unemployed construction workers, and that the class prepares them to pass the basic certification test of the North American Board of Certified Energy Practitioners — aka NABCEP — a strong resume point for solar installers.

But along with installers, the job categories people will need training for in solar may be more in sales, system design and administration, the study found.

Moving to the green job market statewide, Next 10, another nonprofit, released its employment survey, called “Many Shades of Green” earlier this week.  What’s good about this study is that it looks not only at what the group calls the core green economy — such as jobs directly related to renewable energy, energy-efficiency and recycling — but also the secondary, adaptive green economy, which includes businesses that are going green, asking their vendors for greener products or coming up with more sustainable business practices.

The major drawback to this study is that its figures are about two years old — providing job stats only up to 2010. Like the rest of California’s economy, the green sector took its hits in 2009, but had fewer job losses. Overall, the study says, job figures for the state were down 7 percent in 2009, versus just 3 percent in the green economy.

The Inland Empire was one of only three areas in the state where the green economy did worse than other sectors. While overall, the green economy in San Bernardino and Riverside counties has grown 43 percent since 1995, in 2009, green jobs went down 7 percent versus 5 percent for the rest of the economy in the region.

Next 10 did not have breakout figures for Riverside County, but Tracy Gosse, who authored the study, said the region was one of the hardest hit in the recession. In 2009, the area saw drops in business at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, on top of the region’s moribund housing market.  Presumably, 2010-2011 figures, when available, will show some growth.

Still, what the study does show, without overselling or manipulating data, is that the green economy is growing as energy efficiency, renewable energy and recycling all go mainstream and are integrated into the supply chain and, that in many cases, its growth is bottom-line driven.

When Walmart places third on EPA’s list of the top 50 U.S. businesses buying renewable energy — with 75 percent of its California stores having some kind of renewable generation — then green jobs expand and other jobs become greener.

As Andrew Winston, a green business blogger at the Harvard Business Review website, noted in a recent post –

“If the lords of low cost recognize the strategic value of green investments, so can the rest of us. ”

 

Flyover follow-up: where to put solar

Posted: December 12th, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: The Green Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Last Thursday, Desert Sun photographer Marilyn Chung and I joined two other journalists, clambering in to a six-seater airplane flown by Bruce Gordon of EcoFlight, for a flyover of the Riverside East solar zone.

The sponsoring organizations — EcoFlight, the Wilderness Society and the National Parks Conservation Association — wanted to give members of the media a birds-eye view of what those 147,000 acres of pristine desert between Joshua Tree National Park and Blythe look like — utterly breath-taking — and the impact of large-scale solar development on the land.

The flyover was scheduled on the day of the public meeting in Palm Desert about the federal Programmatic Solar Environmental Impact Statement – the big-picture plan for solar development on public lands in six western states, including Riverside East, which is the largest of the 17 areas identified as potential solar zones.

We flew over both GE-NextEra’s 550-megawatt Desert Sunlight project and NextEra’s 250 megawatt Genesis project — both in the early stages of construction. What you see from the air are the graded, raw patches of land with truck tracks and, in the case of Desert Sunlight, some solar frames, but no panels yet. The graded areas visible now are only a small part of the projects’ ultimate size.

In other words, these are going to be big projects, and they will change the visual landscape.  Many environmental groups have repeatedly criticized solar development on federal lands, saying smaller-scale projects — rooftop solar, projects on previously disturbed or fallow agricultural lands — are a better way to go.

The issue with rooftop solar is putting together financing packages to get it on the roofs and overcoming homeowners associations’ aversion to it, again because they don’t like the way panels look. Flying back into Palm Springs airport after the flyover, we also got a birds-eye view of rooftops around the airport, and the ones with solar panels stood out because there were so few. The Walmart on Ramon Road has a large rooftop installation, but next door, Lowe’s — with an equally flat and large roof — doesn’t.  We flew over one residential community that had solar on its roofs; most don’t.

Everyone likes the idea of solar, it seems, but conflicts over where to put it and how to pay for it, are ongoing roadblocks.

Environmental groups are not in total agreement on the issue either–with most falling into one of two camps. First, there are the people with a more local focus — most of the groups speaking at Thursday night’s meeting — kind of NIMD, not in my desert. They are concerned about potential impacts on Joshua Tree National Park, on wildlife migration corridors and cultural resources such as sites still used for tribal ceremonies.

The other groups are taking a more global approach — arguing that the impending impacts of climate change and the critical need to cut greenhouse gas emissions sooner rather than later mean we may have to sacrifice some public lands if they offer the best place to put solar — large, flat areas with high-intensity sun.

Saving desert tortoise habitat isn’t going to do much if the weather changes and the desert no longer provides good habitat for the tortoises, they say.

Obviously, these two approaches are not mutually exclusive, and the environmental groups downplay media reports of conflict between them. Individual groups may have different focuses and may not always agree on tactics, said Jennifer Dickson of the Wilderness Society, but they all know each other and keep talking to each other.

As Shannon Stewart, a program manager for the Bureau of Land Management, said at the end of Thursday’s meeting, we need it all — energy efficiency and both rooftop and large-scale solar, along with other renewables — to meet the ever-shortening time line of climate change.

And, as Anjali Appadurai, a young delegate to the UN climate talks in Durban, said in a rousing speech last week — we need to get it done now.

Energy rising for Riverside East solar

Posted: June 14th, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: The Green Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , ,
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Momentum is building on the industrial scale solar projects in the in the Riverside East solar zone — 202,000 acres of public land between Joshua Tree National Park and Blythe.

In my email box today — the announcement from the Department of Energy that it has approved a $681.6 million loan guarantee for NextEra Energy’s Genesis project, a 250-megawatt solar thermal plant.

This Friday sees the official ground-breaking of Solar Millennium’s Blythe solar project — at 1,000 megawatts one of the largest solar thermal projects in the world.

U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar is going to be the headliner here, along with Bob Abbey, director of the Bureau of  Land Management.

The downside here is Solar Millennium continues to tightly control media access to the site.  Reporters and other offiicals invited to the event will be shuttled out to the site and then shuttled back to Palo Verde Community College for a reception.

I have been lobbying the company hard for several months to get a real site visit to meet and spend time with Solar Millennium’s biological and cultural monitoring teams to see what’s actually involved in clearing the land before construction.  So far I have been given excuses ranging from my lack of the special training required for site access (I said I would gladly take any training required) to personal safety — they were surveying the site for unexploded bombs left over from the land’s World War II use as Gen. George Patton’s desert training center. I was told later no bombs were found.

I have not given up getting my boots on the ground out there,  but not Friday.