A Solar Project That Seems To Make Everybody Happy

A solar project proposed in California’s San Joaquin Valley has been embraced by environmentalists and farmers alike, making the project a potential model for how to address the political, environmental and financial challenges associated with large-scale solar development.

Amazingly, the new project, called the Westlands Solar Park, looks like it is on track to avoid the pitfalls that have thus far hindered other large-scale solar developments.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, large solar power projects – specifically concentrating solar power – could significantly increase water demands. These water impacts pose major challenges because many of the areas with the best solar power resources, such as the Southwestern U.S., have already over-allocated available water supplies so adding another major water user would likely have consequences:

A National Park Service official has warned the Bureau of Land Management that approving dozens of solar power plants in southern Nevada could dramatically impact water supplies across the arid region.

An estimated 63 large-scale solar projects are proposed for BLM lands in the region, and the plants are expected to use a large amount of groundwater to cool and wash solar panels, according to the Feb. 5 memorandum sent by Jon Jarvis, director of the Park Service's Pacific West Region, to BLM's associate state director in Nevada.
...
"In cases where plans of development have been submitted, the vast majority of these projects propose to use utility-scale, concentrating solar power technologies" that "can be expected to consume larger amounts of water" for cooling than other technologies, Jarvis wrote.

"In arid settings, the increased water demand from concentrating solar energy systems employing water-cooled technology could strain limited water resources already under development pressure from urbanization, irrigation expansion, commercial interests and mining," he wrote.

So what makes this new solar development so special? Here’s a NYT article describing the project:

LEMOORE, Calif. — Thousands of acres of once fertile farmland here in the San Joaquin Valley have been removed from agricultural production, largely because it is contaminated by salt buildup from years of irrigation.

But large swaths of those dry fields could have a valuable new use in their future — making electricity.

Farmers and officials at Westlands Water District, a public agency that supplies water to farms in the valley, have agreed to provide land for what would be one of the world’s largest solar energy complexes, to be built on 30,000 acres.

At peak output, the proposed Westlands Solar Park would generate as much electricity as several big nuclear power plants.

Unlike some renewable energy projects blocked by objections that they would despoil the landscape, this one has the support of environmentalists.

The San Joaquin initiative is in the vanguard of a new approach to locating renewable energy projects: putting them on polluted or previously used land. The Westlands project has won the backing of groups that have opposed building big solar projects in the Mojave Desert and have fought Westlands for decades over the district’s water use. Landowners and regulators are on board, too.

“It’s about as perfect a place as you’re going to find in the state of California for a solar project like this,” said Carl Zichella, who until late July was the Sierra Club’s Western renewable programs director. “There’s virtually zero wildlife impact here because the land has been farmed continuously for such a long time and you have proximity to transmission, infrastructure and markets.”

Recycling contaminated or otherwise disturbed land into green energy projects could help avoid disputes when developers seek to build sprawling arrays of solar collectors and wind turbines in more pristine areas, where they can affect wildlife and water supplies.

First off, the development’s inherently large footprint will have very little environmental impacts because the land has been farmed for decades and is no longer supporting the types of fragile ecosystems that environmentalists are trying to protect in the Mojave desert. Land use impacts will be further reduced due to the area’s close proximity to major transmission lines, meaning that miles and miles of transmission lines won’t have to be built to bring electricity to urban centers.

But most importantly, the project won’t significantly increase water demands because it will use photovoltaic solar panels instead of the more water-intensive concentrating solar thermal technologies. In fact, one could even argue that the Westland Solar Park will increase available water by generating electricity on farmland that was once used to irrigate crops. The solar project will provide farmers with a revenue source so that their water rights can either be transferred to the environment or other users, or be applied to irrigate more productive lands that aren’t plagued with salt build up. And as the NYT explains, water really is at the crux of this issue:

For Westlands farmers, the promise of the solar project is not clean electricity, but the additional water allocations they will get if some land is no longer used for farming.

“Westlands’ water supply has been chronically short over the past 18 years, so one of the things we’ve tried to do to balance supply and demand is to take land out of production,” said Thomas W. Birmingham, general manager of the water district, which acquired 100,000 acres and removed the land from most agricultural production. “The conversion of district-owned lands into areas that can generate electricity will help to reduce the cost of providing water to our farmers.”

That is one reason the solar project has the support of local farmers. Circling above his 5,300 acres of farmland in a small plane recently, Mark Shannon gazed down on rows of almond and pistachio trees surrounded by brown fields. With water deliveries slashed because of drought and environmental disputes, he could plant only 20 percent of his property with irrigated crops this year.

“Come hell or high water, there just is not enough water to farm this whole district,” Mr. Shannon, 41, said. “If I lease my land for solar, we can farm elsewhere.”

See also: Will Cutting Down Trees Alleviate Water Woes for Solar Thermal?

Update: Another massive solar project has figured out how to minimize water impacts and is on its way to breaking ground as the first concentrating solar thermal project approved in the U.S. in the last two decades. As the New York Times reports:

California regulators on Wednesday approved a license for the nation’s first large-scale solar thermal power plant in two decades.

The licensing of the 250-megawatt Beacon Solar Energy Project after a two-and-a-half-year environmental review comes as several other big solar farms are set to receive approval from the California Energy Commission in the next month.

In March 2008, NextEra Energy Resources filed an application to build the Beacon project on 2,012 acres of former farmland in Kern County. Long rows of mirrored parabolic troughs will focus sunlight on liquid-filled tubes to create steam that drives an electricity-generating turbine.

Some rural residents immediately objected to the 521 million gallons of groundwater the project would consume annually in an arid region on the western edge of the Mojave Desert. After contentious negotiations with regulators, NextEra agreed to use recycled water that will be piped in from a neighboring community.