Desert hot spot for solar energy

Aid for renewable power sparks land rush in West

Mirrors that will be used to reflect the sun and generate power are hauled at BrightSource Energy’s Ivanpah solar generation plant site in the Mojave Desert last summer.
Mirrors that will be used to reflect the sun and generate power are hauled at BrightSource Energy’s Ivanpah solar generation plant site in the Mojave Desert last summer.

— Construction cranes rise like 40-story storks above the Mojave Desert. In their midst, the “power tower” emerges, wrapped in scaffolding and looking like a multistage rocket.

Clustered nearby are hangar-size assembly buildings, looming berms of sand and a chain-mail fence that will enclose more than 3,500 acres of public land. Moorings for 173,500 mirrors - each the size of a garage door - are spiked into the desert floor. Before the end of the year,they will become six square miles of gleaming reflectors, sweeping from Interstate 15 to the Clark Mountains along California’s eastern border.

BrightSource Energy’s Ivanpah solar-power project soon will be a humming city with 24-hour lighting, a waste water-processing facility and a gas-fired power plant.

The Ivanpah project, which displaced dozens of animal species, including the threatened desert tortoise, has slipped easily into place, unencumbered by lasting legal opposition or public outcry from California’s boisterous environmental community.

“I have spent my entire career thinking of myself as an advocate on behalf of public lands and acting for their protection,” said Johanna Wald, a veteran environmental attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “I am now helping facilitate an activity on public lands that will have very significant environmental impacts. We are doing it because of the threat of climate change. It’s not an accommodation; it’s a change I had to make to respond to climate.”

Industrial-scale solar development is well under way in California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah. The federal government has furnished 21 million acres of public property.

“The scale of impacts that we are facing, collectively across the desert, is phenomenal,” said Dennis Schramm, former superintendent at neighboring Mojave National Preserve. “The reality of the Ivanpah project is that what it will look like on the ground is worse than any of the analyses predicted.”

The $2 billion BrightSource solar plant is an amalgam of gadgetry designed to wring the maximum energy from the sun. Computers continually focus the field of mirrors to a center tower that is filled with water, which will heat to more than 1,000 degrees.The resulting steam drives an array of turbines capable of generating 370 megawatts, enough to power roughly 140,000 homes during peak hours.

Capturing a free and clean source of energy is not cheap, with capital costs and other market factors making it three times more expensive than natural gas or coal.

Ratepayers’ bills will be as much as 50 percent higher for renewable energy, according to an analysis from the consumer advocate branch of the state Public Utilities Commission.

What has opened the way for such a costly source of energy is the dramatic turn in federal policy. As early as 2005, the Bush administration established generous programs to reward renewable energy developers. The Obama administration sweetened the pot, offering $45 billion in federal tax credits, guaranteed loans and grants.

On the state level, former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, freed large solar plants from property tax and handed out $90 million in exemptions from sales and use taxes. Under Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown, the state invested more than $70 million in clean energy research last year, funded by a ratepayer surcharge.

The funding has sparked a land rush that echoes the speculative booms in mining, railroad construction, and oil and gas on Western federal land.

Oakland, Calif.-based BrightSource Energy Inc., one of the first firms out of the gate, received $1.6 billion in federally guaranteed loans in addition to hundreds of millions in private capital derived from such disparate sources as NRG Energy Inc., Google Inc., investment bank Morgan Stanley and CalSTRS, the California state’s teachers’ retirement fund.

By taking advantage of the available government subsidies, solar developers can cover close to 80 percent of a multi-billion dollar project with taxes, and the rest comes from investors.

BrightSource’s Ivanpah facility is expected to employ 1,000 workers at the height of construction, but that will shrink to 86 full-time maintenance and facility workers once it is up and running.

Business, Pages 19 on 02/13/2012

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