$2.1B Loan Guarantee from DOE for Giant Solar Farm
by Ucilia Wang, gigaom.com, 04.18.2011
It’s a double-whopper: The federal government said Monday it’s offering the largest loan guarantee commitment yet for solar to what is the world’s largest proposed solar farm for now. Blythe Solar Project is set to get a $2.1 billion loan guarantee to build half of the 1,000MW plant in California’s desert.
The guarantee, if finalized, will be used to build 500MW, from which 484MW will be delivered to Southern California Edison. The developer, Solar Trust of America, is designing the project to be made up of four, 250MW units, a company spokesman told med. But the power each needs to produce to fulfill the company’s contract with Edison is less than the full capacity.
The loan guarantee will cover not only half of the solar farm construction but also eight miles of transmission lines and other related power delivery infrastructure, said the U.S. Department of Energy. The $2.1 billion is the second largest loan guarantee offered by the U.S. Department of Energy. The title holder goes to Georgia Power, which received a $8.33 billion conditional commitment for a nuclear power plant.
Solar Trust America, a joint venture between German firms Solar Millennium and Ferrostaal, already started preliminary construction of the project last fall by putting in an access road and some water supply infrastructure. The company plans to start building the project in earnest in late spring or early summer, said Uwe Schmidt, CEO of Solar Trust, during a conference call Monday. The first half of the solar farm will cost an estimated $2.8 billion, Schmidt said, and Solar Trust expects to start building the second half of the power plant within two years.
The project will use curved mirrors to concentrate sunlight to heat up fluid, which will be used to produce steam to run generators. Solar Trust plans to use the new HelioTroughcollectors for the solar farm. In all, the 1000MW power plant will reside on 9,400 acres in Riverside County and cost more than $5 billion, the company said. The power plant equipment will take up about 5,950 acres.
California has long been the largest solar energy market in the country, thanks largely to its policy and subsidies that encourage small-scale installations at homes, businesses and government buildings. The state mandate for its utilities also is turning California into home for large solar farms and making it a major beneficiary of federal programs to fund renewable energy power plant construction.
Just last week, Energy Secretary Steve Chu announced a conditional loan guarantee commitment of $1.2 billion for SunPower to build a 250MW project in central California that will be owned by NRG Energy. Also last week, the DOE finalized a $1.6 billion loan guarantee with BrightSource Energy to build a 392MW solar farm in California’s Mojave Desert.
California requires its utilities to get 20 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2013 and 33 percent by 2020. The state Legislature passed a bill to set the 33 percent mandate last month, and Gov. Brown signed it last week. Brown, like his predecessor, also styled himself as a renewable energy champion and joined the press conference for Blythe Solar’s loan guarantee announcement Monday.
The California Energy Commission approved nine solar power projects in just four months last year, decisions that have drawn lawsuits from critics who argue that the commission didn’t do enough to make sure some of the projects won’t have a significant impact on wildlife. The state Supreme Court tossed two such lawsuits, one of which was filed by Sierra Club, last week.
Categories: Construction News
Tags: solar construction blythe solar farm procore dealer construction cloudware protech web based constru
The Solyndra case proves that the DOE LOAN and ATVM funding was based on pure bribery and lobby manipulation. All of the failure points on Solyndra have been visible for ages. Feinstein and DOE pushed the money to Solyndra in exchange for pass by fees to their friends and campaigns.
Kleiner Perkins put Chu in office as Secratary in order to get favored nations funding for their portfolio companies and keep competitors to those portfolio companies from getting funded. Steve Westly and Kholsa helped them along with Raj Gupta.
Detroit's lobbyists said,” we can’t get you any more taxpayer money because the public knows we are liars” “Tell them we need the money to build electric cars- and then we can BS them into coughing it up” said the lobbyists. The law said that the money was to go to any American car company but it only went to a Japanese company and Detroit. (Tesla is now controlled by Detroit no matter what crap Elon foists off so don't say they are not part of it.) All of the independent electric car companies who weren't part of Detroit or the Gore VC's were blockaded from funding. The way they did it is against the law.
The DOE ATVM And Loan Gaurantee programs were conducted by criminals in order to commit crimes. Steve Rattner, who was at the head of those programs, has already been charged with crimes. Lachlan Seward, Matt Rogers and the rest of them need to go to jail.
Steve Rattner (Now a proven criminal by the State of NY), Lachland Seward, Matt Rogers and his partner Steve Spinner and most of Tesla’s friends at McKinsey Consulting from Silicon Valley (Who used Tax payer jets to fly back and forth to Silicon Valley to go bike riding), Steve Westley and a group who now left DOE, and some who are still there are criminals. They stole your tax money and put in their friends pockets. Federal investigations have already shown that Detroit embezzeled and misspent the first monies distributed.
The few applicants that did get money spent tens of millions of dollars on bribes and lobby “incentives” equal in ratio to the money they got. Now the White House says that $17B of the taxpayer money that DEtroit got is a write-off and is lost forever. In other words Detroit has already embezzeled more money than all of the other applicants applied for put together.
Google Tesla’s Siry on “DOE stifles innovation” to read what one of the highest level staff at one of the car companies said.
The GAO, a federal crime busting agency, just released public reports saying that the DOE Loan programs were corrupt. All of the people under Seward were “connected” or “made men” in the Detroit cadre. Seward changed the section 136 first-come-first serve rule (Which appears to be illegal) in order to provide advantages to his friends in Detroit who didnt bother to apply in time and to cut out the smaller players who were already ahead in the application proces
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