Recycling Land for Green Energy Ideas
J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times
One of the world's largest solar projects is
planned in the San Joaquin Valley. Farmland, both out of irrigated
production and active, would be used.
By TODD WOODY
Published: August 10, 2010
LEMOORE, Calif. — Thousands of acres of farmland here in the San
Joaquin Valley have been removed from agricultural production, largely
because the once fertile land 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 pristine areas, where they can affect wildlife and
water supplies.
The United States
Environmental Protection Agency and the National Renewable Energy
Laboratory, for instance, are evaluating a dozen landfills and toxic
waste sites for wind farms or solar power plants. In Arizona, the
Bureau of Land Management has begun a program to repurpose landfills
and abandoned mines for renewable energy.
In Southern California, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power
has proposed building a 5,000-megawatt solar array complex, part of
which would cover portions of the dry bed of Owens Lake, which was
drained when the city began diverting water from the Owens Valley in
1913. Having already spent more than $500 million to control the intense
dust storms that sweep off the lake, the agency hopes solar panels can
hold down the dust while generating clean electricity for the utility. A
small pilot project will help determine if solar panels can withstand
high winds and dust.
“Nothing about this is simple, but it’s worth doing,” Austin Beutner,
the department’s interim general manager, said of the pilot program.
All of the projects are in early stages of development, and many
obstacles remain. But the support they’ve garnered from landowners,
regulators and environmentalists has attracted the interest of big solar
developers such as
SunPower and First Solar as well as utilities under pressure to meet
aggressive renewable energy mandates.
Those targets have become harder to reach as the sunniest undeveloped
land is put off limits.
Last December, Senator
Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California,
introduced legislation to protect nearly a million acres of the
Mojave Desert from renewable energy development.
But the senator’s bill also includes tax incentives for developers
who build renewable energy projects on disturbed lands.
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 farmers.
Circling above his 5,300 acres 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.”
That morning, representatives of the water district, the Sierra Club,
the
Natural Resources Defense Council and Westlands Solar Park, had
gathered in a field of dry-farmed wheat on his property to talk
strategy.
“We’re holding Westlands up as a model to utilities, regulators and
solar developers on how to take pressure off undeveloped land and move
projects forward,” said Helen O’Shea, deputy director of the N.R.D.C.’s
Western renewable energy project.
Daniel Kim and Bob Dowds, the principals of Westside Holdings, the
firm that has proposed the Westlands Solar Park, said the first phase of
the project would consist of 9,000 acres leased from farmers. When
covered in solar panels, that acreage would generate 600 to 1,000
megawatts of electricity. One megawatt is enough to power a
Wal-Mart Supercenter.
Westlands sits in a major transmission corridor, and existing
capacity in the area could realistically accommodate up to 600 megawatts
from the project, according to Mr. Dowds. Building out the solar park to
5,000 megawatts will require major upgrades to transmission lines and
take more than a decade.
“You’re talking about billions of dollars of investment, private and
public to make this really work at that scale,” Mr. Dowds said.
Brian McDonald, director of renewable resource development for
Pacific Gas and Electric, California’s largest utility, said, “Right
now, Westlands is a concept we strongly support.” However, he added that
with such reuse projects, “the proof is in the pudding — on the surface,
they tend to look simple but they realistically have a lot of hurdles to
overcome to build them out.”
SunPower, a Silicon Valley company that is one of the nation’s
largest solar panel manufacturers and photovoltaic power plant
developers, has had initial discussions with Westlands Solar Park
officials. “I think you’ll see quite a bit of solar there, and we
certainly want to be a part of that,” said Paul McMillan, an executive
with SunPower.
Dave Kranz, a spokesman for the California Farm Bureau Federation,
said that solar energy might make sense for Westlands, but added in an
e-mail: “We believe that farmland should be used for farming, and that
productive farmland is an environmental attribute as valuable as
renewable energy production.”
The pressure to reuse farmland for energy production is likely to
accelerate, though. The federal government wants Westlands to take
another 100,000 acres out of production to ameliorate salt and selenium
problems. And
Cadiz, a big California landowner, is considering converting more
than 10,000 acres of farmland in the sun-soaked Mojave Desert for use as
a solar park, according to Richard E. Stoddard, chief of the Cadiz Real
Estate unit.
For Mr. Shannon, whose family has farmed the land here for three
generations, going solar will allow him to continue farming on property
he owns on the other side of the valley.
“We just want to get enough money to get the bank off our back,” he
said. “We would love to stay here because this is some of the best dirt
in the world. But I can’t farm myself out of this water problem.”
Copyright 2010 The New York Times
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