Irish Developer Backs Desert Solar Farm

4/17/2008 - North County Times
By Dave Downey - Staff Writer

An Irish green-energy developer announced Thursday it is investing $100 million and taking controlling interest in Phoenix-based Stirling Energy Systems, which wants to build two of the world's largest solar farms in the Southern California desert.

One of the solar farms would be built in the Imperial Valley, near the Salton Sea. With an initial capacity to generate 300 megawatts and the ability later to produce 900, it is the single largest project San Diego Gas & Electric Co. is counting on to help the utility shift to a greener future.

SDG&E, like California's other major urban utilities, faces a state mandate to deliver 20 percent of its electricity from clean, so-called renewable power by 2010.

SDG&E has said it could deliver the initial 300 megawatts through the existing Southwest Powerlink transmission line through southern San Diego County, but will need the 1,000-megawatt-capacity Sunrise Powerlink proposed for North County to bring in the rest of the power.

"This is a very exciting investment for NTR," said Jim Barry, chief executive for NTR, the international green-energy developer founded in Ireland in 1978, in a prepared statement issued Thursday. "In SES, we have a partner with high growth potential and a leading cost position in the fast-growing concentration solar power sector."

Besides the Imperial Valley solar farm, Stirling is also proposing to build a similar-sized array of mirrored dishes that capture and concentrate the sun's rays and make electricity in the Mojave Desert. The company calls its system, something pioneered in New Mexico at the U.S. Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories, the SunCatcher.

That Mojave Desert project is intended to supply Southern California Edison, supplier of power to much of the region, including Riverside County and part of Orange County.

SDG&E supplies electricity to San Diego County and southern Orange County.

When fully built out, the two plants would combine to generate 1,750 megawatts ---- more than a third of what San Diego County residents use on a hot summer day.

Power-line opponents agree solar is a largely untapped resource, but they contend it is too costly and damaging to the environment to build massive solar farms in the desert and huge transmission lines to send the electricity they produce to Southern California's cities.

One such opponent, David Hogan of the Center for Biological Diversity, added that the solar technology being touted has yet to make the leap from the laboratory to large-scale commercial use and suggested the Imperial Valley plant is far from a sure thing.

"The Stirling project is desert mirage," Hogan said.

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