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Kings County solar projects advance

-June 25,2019-

Recurrent's Mustang Solar project

Recurrent’s Mustang Solar project

A sea of solar panels

Several giant solar projects are progressing toward construction this summer in Kings County along the Avenal Cutoff near I-5.

Kings County’s top planner Chuck Kinney says Recurrent Energy’s RE Slate project, a 2500 acre,300MW solar farm will be the subject of a public hearing, likely in August The project’s draft EIR was released in the past few weeks. RE Slate would be the county’s largest solar farm.The review period for the project ends July 16. The coming sea of solar panels would stretch some 10 miles in the old lakebed of Kings County (see map).

Recurrent's planned RE Slate project

Recurrent’s planned RE Slate project

Recurrent Energy plans to own or lease the land for the Avenal Cutoff facility from its owners Westlake Farms, Westlands Water District and Sandridge Partners.

Kinney says a second big solar project being filed by Westlands Solar Park – a 250MW project called Aquamarine that will likely be the subject of a permit hearing perhaps by September. The big renewable energy project sits on 2500 acres, also near the Avenal Cutoff.

Westlands Solar Park is actively working on permitting of two additional meg-solar projects nearby.

Westlands Solar Blue has filed a preliminary application at the beginning of this year for a 250MW project on 1950 acres located on Laurel in western Kings County.

The same developer filed for a project called Chestnut, a 150 MW solar farm on 980 acres located between the Avenal Cutoff and Hwy 41.

Westlands Solar Park has stated they hope to phase-build up to 2000MW of power in the area in the Westlands Water District on salt damaged land no longer fit for farming. They hope to have 700MW on line by 2021.

The concept is to site solar farms on spent ag land with few environmental impacts. The plan has gained widespread political support in California looking to minimize more solar farms on pristine land in the California desert even as the state moves toward using near 100 percent renewables in the future.

Together with the Recurrent project the four pending solar farms would add up to nearly 1000MW – comparable in output to a nuclear power plant.

The August hearing for Recurrent’s RE Slate will detail plans for the project with construction expected to begin as early as October 2020 and could occur in phases. Project construction is expected to take 14 months.

RE Slate would also feature the state’s largest solar storage system-a 300-MW energy storage system (ESS) with a 4-hour capacity or approximately 1,200 MW hours, consisting of battery or flywheel enclosures and electrical cabling and equipment. California utilities must procure 1,325 MWs of energy storage by 2020.

RE Slate would operate year-round to generate solar electricity during daylight hours and would store and dispatch power at the storage facility during both daylight and non-daylight hours. The anticipated operating life of the facility is up to 40 years. The solar facility would include an estimated 3 million to 5 million solar modules.

Community choice aggregators will buy the power

Last fall Recurrent Energy signed two 15-year power purchase agreements with Silicon Valley Clean Energy and Monterey Bay Community Power for a 150 megawatt solar power system with 180 megawatt-hours of battery storage. This joint procurement effort represents the largest contracted solar-plus-storage project in California to date.

Power for these communities organized as Community Choice Aggregators will be supplied from Recurrent Energy’s Slate photovoltaic-plus-storage project to be built in Kings County. The project is scheduled to reach commercial operation in 2021, and the energy represented by the contracts is enough to power 37,500 homes, providing Silicon Valley Clean Energy with 55 percent of the energy, and Monterey Bay with the other 45 percent of the combined output.
If approved by Kings County, the big project will join a half dozen other solar projects built or in the works nearby on both sides of the Avenal Cutoff Road. That includes the two Mustang projects (Mustang and Mustang Two), as well as the Kent and pending Westland Aquamarine project, as discussed earlier. This will create virtually a sea of solar panels on both sides of the road in the next few years that connects I-5 to NAS Lemoore.

San Francisco-based Recurrent Energy has developed four operating solar projects in the county and is developing two additional projects, including the Slate project. They are owned by Canadian Solar who purchased the company from Sharp in 2015. Canadian Solar, besides being a major developer of solar farms, is one of the three top solar panel makers in the world.

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