Gretchen Weber

Construction of one of three planned solar thermal towers at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, Ivanpah Dry Lake, CA

Construction of the Ivanpah site is reportedly on-schedule for completion in 2013

The National Clean Energy Summit 4.0 opens in Las Vegas on Tuesday, bringing policy makers and industry leaders from around the country together to “chart the course for the future of energy in America.” It’s also attracting lots of media, which is why on Monday Oakland-based BrightSource Energy opened the gates to the construction site of its 3,500 acre Ivanpah Solar Complex, which lies just over the California border, 45 minutes southwest of the Las Vegas Strip.

About 15 reporters donned hard hats and safety goggles in 100-plus temperatures to tour the active construction site in the Mojave Desert, along with officials from BrightSource, San Francisco-based construction company Bechtel Corp., and NRG Energy, which, along with Google, is the project’s main investor.

Touted as the the largest solar thermal plant under construction in the world today, the 370-megawatt array is expected to power 140,000 homes when it’s completed in 2013.  BrightSource officials say that will double the total solar thermal capacity of the entire United States, and increase the world’s supply by about a third.

Gretchen Weber

Ivanpah constuction from a distance

The site will eventually consist of three towers more than 450-feet tall and 53,000 “heliostats” dotting the surrounding acreage. Heliostats are the mirrors that focus the sun’s energy onto a boiler at the top of the tower, creating the heat necessary to generate steam and energy.

BrightSource’s Carlos Aguilar said that by employing a technology called dry cooling, which uses air to cool the plant instead of water, the site will use 97% less water than it otherwise would have. The project is slated to use about 100 acre-feet of water per year, which, he said, is about the amount used by 300 homes in a year.

“Three-hundred homes’ worth of water use for 140,000 homes’ worth of energy is quite a trade-off,” said Aguilar.

Another low-impact environmental strategy at the site includes efforts to keep the natural contours of the land intact, in order to keep the natural drainage system functioning.  And according to BrightSource CEO John Woolard, because the plant is 50% more efficient than a photovoltaic installation, it’s able to encompass a smaller footprint.

“We’ve got probably the lowest environmental impact of any technology out there in solar,” said Woolard.

Gretchen Weber

That hasn’t stopped activists from organizing pickets outside the company’s headquarters in downtown Oakland. Ivanpah has been the target of some environmental groups arguing that the solar installation threatens the endangered desert tortoise.  In April, the Bureau of Land Management shut down construction on two sections of site when more tortoises were found on-site than expected. But in June, after further environmental review, the agency granted permission for work to resume. On Monday, Bechtel and BrightSource officials said the project is on schedule.

The event was an unusually high-profile affair for BrightSource of late, as the company is preparing for an initial public offering of stock and is in an SEC-enforced “quiet” period.

What some have billed as the world’s largest solar project in the Mojave came under fire again today. This time a baby desert tortoise led the charge with a cohort of environmentalists. While the tortoise provided a slow-motion picket around downtown Oakland, protestors lined up in front of BrightSource Energy’s corporate headquarters, determined to preserve the Mojave desert and keep solar projects local.

A baby desert tortoise stakes out a position outside BrightSource Energy headquarters in Oakland. (Photo: Chris Penalosa)

At risk of habitat loss from the project, the tortoise is becoming the iconic image for preservation of the Mojave. The Bureau of Land Management put the brakes on two-thirds of the Ivanpah solar farm when field biologists found more tortoises than initially expected. Tortoises found on site are being relocated and fenced off, preventing their gradual return.

Karen Rusiniack, member of the Oakland non-profit preservation group Desert Survivors, claims that relocation of the animals presents risks of its own. “Think about it,” she said. “These are creatures that have very limited resources in the desert. They are set up in their little burrows, they know where their little supermarket is, where they can go and get plants, they make little depressions in the landscape to get their water. They’re at home in their land.”

Activists in front of BrightSource Energy headquarters also targeted Google, which is investing more than $160 million in BrightSource. (Photo: Chris Penalosa)

Two segments of the Ivanpah solar farm are on hold until the federal Fish and Wildlife Service issues a plan for relocating the tortoises. Despite the controversy, BrightSource maintains that the project will finish on schedule in 2013.

Google announced it would invest $168 million in the project. The Department of Energy announced $1.6 billion loan guarantee. And on Friday, the company announced it plans to go public with a $250 million initial public offering. But a recurring issue has popped up: the desert tortoise.

A Mojave desert tortoise. (Image: USGS)

“It’s an endangered species. No project that is sited out there in within their habitat can negatively impact the population,” says Erin Curtis, a spokesperson for the Bureau of Land Management. As anyone following the battles over solar farms knows, prime desert tortoise habitat also happens to be prime solar territory and has been targeted by a number of proposed solar farms.

BrightSource Energy agreed to mitigate the impacts their solar farm would have on the tortoises by capturing and relocating them to new habitat. Fences are being constructed to prevent the tortoises from returning.

In all, biologists are allowed to relocate or handle 38 tortoises over the lifetime of the project. But they’ve been finding more tortoises than expected and have already hit that limit.

“Therefore we needed to suspend activities so we didn’t touch another tortoise until we have a new biological opinion. You’re trying to manage wild animals and they don’t act in a predictable fashion. It’s adaptive management and we learn new things all the time,” says Curtis.

BLM has shut down construction on two sections of the solar thermal farm, until the Fish and Wildlife Service can issue a new decision on how many tortoises are in the area and where they could be relocated to. Biologists are now estimating that roughly 140 tortoises could live in the 3,500 acre project footprint.

That decision is expected to take three to four months and surveys are currently underway. BrightSource Energy has said they don’t expect the solar farm to be delayed.

Largest Solar-Thermal Project Breaks Ground
Officials broke ground on the first large-scale solar-thermal plant to be built in the United States in 20 years. BrightSource Energy says its $2 billion, 10,000-MW Ivanpah project, located in the Mojave Desert, will be the largest solar thermal project in the world.  (More from KQED’s The California Report and The New York Times)

Prop. 23 Funding
Opponents of Proposition 23 have contributed three times as much money to the campaign as those in favor of the measure that would suspend California’s climate change legislation.  As of October 29, the “No” campaign had raised more than $30 million, while the “Yes” campaign had raised just over $10 million, mostly from out-of-state oil refiners Valero and Tesoro.  (More from maplight.org, and to see where across the US the money is coming from, check out Climate Watch‘s interactive map that tracks the major funders.)

New Bay Area Bike Share Program
The Bay Area launches an ambitious bike-sharing program with a $4.29 million grant from the Metropolitan Planning Commission (MTC) and more than $2 million from local and regional partners, including the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. Beginning next year, the program will focus on commuters in the suburbs between San Jose and San Francisco, and will involve about 1,000 bikes. (More from The New York Times)

Funding for Electric Vehicles
Electric vehicle programs also got a boost in the Bay Area with $30 million in funds ($14 million in federal funding through the MTC). Projects include charging-and-battery-swapping stations, as well as new electric taxis and City Car Share vehicles. (More from the SF Chronicle and KQED’s California Money)

New Federal Emissions Rules for Big Trucks
This week the EPA announced new rules for heavy-duty trucks and buses that call for a 20% emissions reduction by 2018.  The rules, which are the first of their kind, apply to model 2014 and beyond and are expected to improve fuel economy from six, to eight miles per gallon. (More from the LA Times)

At solar-thermal plants, mirrors concentrate solar energy on a central tower, where steam is generated to run turbines. (Image: BrightSource Energy)

Prepare for a solar building boom in the deserts of Southern California. After spending years in the environmental review process and clearing other bureaucratic hurdles, approvals for clean energy producers are picking up steam.

State regulators have now given the green light to four major solar power projects in as many weeks. The most recent was on Wednesday, when the California Energy Commission gave the nod to a 370-megawatt solar-thermal array known as the Ivanpah project (the CEC does not have authority over photovoltaic or “PV” solar arrays). Developed by Oakland-based BrightSource Energy and built by Bechtel Corp., it will consume more than 3,500 acres near the California-Nevada border, in the northern Mojave Desert.

In recent weeks the CEC has also approved applications for three other projects in Kern, Riverside and San Bernardino Counties. The four projects combined will be rated to deliver almost 1,900 megawatts of power, or the equivalent of two typical commercial nuclear reactors (an important distinction being that nukes run 24/7, while solar plants generate power about 14 hours a day). Projects representing about 1,000 more MW of solar-thermal energy come up for final decision before the end of the month.

BrightSource CEO John Woolard told me that after more than three years in the review process, the wait was worth it.

“Ultimately I think the process works,” Woolard told me in a brief interview after the CEC’s approval of Ivanpah. “Hopefully it’ll work faster or more expeditiously for people behind us. But I can tell you that it’s the most through and complete process I’ve ever gone through.”

Not thorough enough for some environmental groups, it would seem. At the final hearing, Eileen Anderson of the Center for Biological Diversity called it “a sad day.” Her ally Barbara Boyle, at the Sierra Club, agreed.

“We’ve been spending countless hours meeting with developers and with the agencies to try and site these projects right,” Boyle told me.
“We’re working real hard to make that process better in the future but for right now we have quite a few projects that are going to have serious local impacts and it’s disappointing,” she said. Boyle said she thought environmentalists had a deal with BrightSource to shift some of the solar arrays away from sensitive habitat for rare plants and the threatened desert tortoise–but were disappointed that the company didn’t change its original layout after all (though at one point in the process the project was downsized by nearly 500 acres).

Energy Commissioner Jeff Byron concedes that Ivanpah will have some “significant impacts” on the environment but that those will be outweighed by the benefits.

“Southern California–the desert, the Mojave, represents the Saudi Arabia of renewable energy,” said Byron. “There’s geothermal, wind and solar there, so–this is a start. It’s a substantial start.”

State regulators are under pressure to meet a goal to get one third of the state’s electricity from renewable sources, within 10 years. The state’s Air Resources Board is likely to issue its own regulation this week, making that goal a legal mandate for utilities.

A solar-thermal array uses mirrors to concentrate sunlight. (Image: BrightSource Energy)

On a media call this week in which executives and investors from the solar industry stumped for extensions to key federal incentives, I heard Fred Morse of Abengoa Solar say that the company’s Solana project in Gila Bend, Arizona, will be, as described on the project website, “the world’s largest solar plant.” Later that same day, an email came in from Oakland-based BrightSource Energy, (not in response) touting its Ivanpah project as “the largest solar project in the world.” Similar terms have been used to describe Solargen’s proposed 4,700-acre photovoltaic array in San Benito County.

The power generation business has entered a new age of superlatives.

There are various ways of measuring size. The physical footprint of the plant could be one but usually such projects are ranked by their planned power capacity, in megawatts. BrightSource says Ivanpah will be about 400 MW. Peterson says that if Solargen isn’t forced to downsize the Panoche array to get it permitted, it would clock in at 420 MW (to put this in perspective, the twin reactors at PG&E’s Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant are rated at more than 1,000 MW–each).

Part of the confusion may lie in the different technologies. Utility-scale solar projects can be either PV or “solar-thermal” arrays. The latter uses focused sunlight to make steam and requires fewer panels for the same output.

According to BrightSource CEO John Woolard, size matters. Woolard estimates that in order to stabilize atmospheric carbon at 450 parts per million (we’re at 392 and counting) by 2050, “Every day we have to build the equivalent – somewhere in this world – of a nuclear power-plant’s-worth of output of carbon-free energy. It’ll be a combination of wind, solar, some nuclear, maybe we’ll figure out carbon sequestration, but 1 gigawatt per day.”

In any case, new projects are being slated at such a pace that the answer to which is the biggest may be: “What day is it?”

It looks pretty big but PG&E's Vaca-Dixon PV array generates just 2 MW--and that's the strategy. (Photo: Craig Miller)

Meanwhile, some developers are taking the opposite tack. Last month, PG&E threw the ceremonial switch on its Vaca-Dixon solar array, just off I-80, west of Davis. It’s an example of what you might call “solar infill.” Built on 16,000 acres surrounded by farmland, the photovoltaic (PV) array generates just two megawatts of power for the grid. Eventually, though, the utility plans to build out enough PV patches to produce 500 MW (enough to power about 150,000 average homes in California); half on its own and half from contractors. All the arrays, however, will be two megawatts or less.

In the video clip below, PG&E President Chris Johns talks about the company’s newest solar mini-farm.

By the way, Terra-Gen Power announced this week that after lining up more than a billion dollars in financing, it will break ground next week on a 3,000-megawatt wind farm in Kern County. Once all five phases of the Alta Wind Energy Center are built, it would be, according to Terra-Gen, “the largest wind power project in the world”…of course.