Big solar farm was Kings County’s biggest project last year 

 -February 3,2023-

What’s more valuable than all the commercial building projects permitted in Kings County in 2022? One 1000 acre solar project.

One utility-scale solar project permitted in Kings County in October 2022 valued at $62.2 million eclipsed the value of all other commercial permits in the county at $62.01 million. That solar project is one of the 12 Westlands Solar Farm projects built or pending – named Chestnut along the Avenal Highway.

Meanwhile the California PUC is poised to order California’s power providers to procure an additional 4 GW of resources, to come online in 2026 and 2027 pointing to a variety of factors, says a report in the magazine Utility Dive.

They include “increasing electric demand, more than regulators  anticipated, likely due to extreme weather, a greater expected increase in electric vehicles, higher usage of air conditioning, and electrification of the built environment. At the same time, California expects to have less access to imported electricity from its neighboring states, as they face similar trends.”

That will mean plenty of new solar projects in the Valley that will need to launch permitting soon to come on line in that time frame.

In the meantime more big firms are adding renewable energy  for their own use. That includes Home Depot which has pledged to produce or procure 100% renewable electricity equivalent to the electricity needs for all of its facilities by 2030. The home improvement company says they’ll add solar to 25 California stores starting early in 2023.There are 10 stores between Fresno and Delano in the Central Valley.

Also Amazon now says last year’s additions to their renewables portfolio included 918 megawatts of energy produced in Arizona, California and Texas.

Amazon says they made renewable-energy investments in late 2022 that will enable it to operate on 100% clean energy as soon as 2025, five years ahead of its original target, the company said.

According to a report from industry trade group the American Clean Power Association, Amazon, along with Facebook parent company Meta Platforms Inc. (META) and Google, owned by parent company Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL), are the top three corporate purchasers of wind and solar energy.

 

The three lead a total of 326 companies that had contracted for 77.4 gigawatts of wind and solar energy by the end of 2022, which is enough energy to power over 1,000 data centers or 18 million American homes, American Clean Power said.

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