We stood in the quiet fan sloping gradually down from snow-covered Clark Mountain on the border of the Mojave National Preserve. The winter day was brisk and breezy, the air fresh, and the creosote bushes were green from recent rains. I noticed many animal tracks in the sandy washes winding through the cactus and bursage: coyotes, bobcats, kangaroo rats, kit foxes. Small green rosettes of annual wildflowers poked their leaves upwards, a harbinger of the coming spring when their blooms would add color to this desert.
Meanwhile in the distant city, other folks had designs on this land. Plans were being made, investments sought, deals struck. On February 11, Southern California Edison agreed to purchase 13,000 megawatts of electricity from solar projects to be built by Oakland-based BrightSource Energy. It was the largest solar electricity deal in the world. BrightSource has been busy during the past two years undergoing the long application process to gain control of nearly 4,000 acres (about 6.4 square miles) of public land near the Nevada border in order to build a 400 megawatt (MW) solar thermal "power tower" plant, the first stage of the deal.
Here would be the so-called Ivanpah Solar Energy Generating System (ISEGS).
The Preliminary Staff Assessment (PSA) describing the project, prepared by the California Energy Commission, dryly notes: "The ISEGS site would be located in an undeveloped area. Brush would be cleared prior to grading."
"Implementation...would result in extensive grading and removal of existing desert soils, resulting in the potential for increased erosion and offsite sedimentation." This grading would take five months.
After the desert habitat is completely removed with large scraper machines, and the site is "cut and filled" 318,000 heliostat mirrors would be placed in curving rows aiming the sunlight up to boilers located on centralized 459-foot tall power towers. Each mirror would track the sun throughout the day and reflect the solar energy to the receiver boiler. In each of the 5 plants, one Rankine-cycle reheat steam turbine would then receive the steam from the solar boilers to turn turbine generators. Herbicides would then be regularly sprayed, according to the PSA, to keep weeds down and prevent fire-fuel build-up.
Administrative and maintenance buildings, a warehouse, detention ponds, and even a small sewage system would also be built on-site, and small amounts of hazardous wastes produced that "contain mercury, lead, cadmium, copper, and other substances hazardous to human and environmental health." In other words, this will be an industrial site, not a "green" project.
The PSA states the project will create 90 jobs and people will have to commute one hour each way. Will these people be required to drive electric cars? This does not really help reduce green house gases.
The locations of subsequent solar generation projects are yet to be chosen, but would theoretically be completed in stages by 2016, with Ivanpah set to open by 2013. BrightSource wants a total of 10,500 acres of public land run by the Bureau of Land Management. The company plans to sell 300 MW of power from the Ivanpah solar plant to Pacific Gas & Electric, and the remainder to Southern California Edison.
The proposed project represents part of the efforts by some to sacrifice over one million acres of public lands and arid lands ecosystems in California alone to questionable "green" energy projects. The scope of impacts and environmental devastation that will result from these projects are not worth the amount of energy, that could instead be generated from urban rooftop photovoltaic panels.
BrightSource raised more than $160 million from equity investors including Google.org, VantagePoint Venture Partners, and Draper Fisher Jurvetson, but they will need billions of dollars more to develop the full 13,000 MW worth of power plants. Edison will not admit how much it is paying for the solar-generated power, but did say that the electricity from the first Ivanpah plant will be priced below the state benchmark known as the Market Price Referent, 12.5 cents a kilowatt-hour. We guess that the cost to generate the electricity from the solar thermal plant would be just under this figure. Natural gas costs 4.7 cents per kilowatt-hour to generate.
BrightSource probably chose the Ivanpah site partly because it is right across the valley from the Bighorn Generating Station, a 598-megawatt natural gas-fired, combined-cycle power plant located near Primm, Nevada, approximately 35 miles south of Las Vegas. The Ivanpah solar project will need natural gas too in order to keep the start-up boiler warm during cloudy days and cold mornings. Natural gas for the project would be obtained by a new 5.3-mile long natural gas pipeline connecting to the Kern River Gas Transmission Line, less than a half a mile to the north of
the project site.
