6.2 Gigawatt Solar Farm Moves Forward in Nevada

From Heatmap.

The Esmeralda 7 solar project, a collection of proposed solar farms and batteries that would encompass tens of thousands of acres of federal public lands in western Nevada, appears to be moving towards the end of its federal permitting process.

The farms developed by NextEra, Invenergy, Arevia, ConnectGen, and others together would add up to 6,200 megawatts of solar generation capacity, making it the largest solar project in already solar-rich Nevada.

To get a sense of the massive scale of the project, the two newly installed nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle in Georgia are about 1,000 megawatts each and the Empire Wind offshore wind project that Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum ordered a halt to this week had a planned capacity of just over 800 megawatts.

Earlier this month, the Bureau of Land Management updated its website for the project, indicating that the final Environmental Impact Statement for the project would be published on April 25 and the record of decision would be published on July 18.

A Bureau of Land Management spokesperson told me that the Bureau wouldn’t have anything new to share until the publication of the final environmental impact statement “in the coming days or week or so.”

Still, the fact that the BLM is making progress on a decision at all is yet another sign that the “freeze” on renewables projects put in place in the early days of the Trump administration has begun to thaw, at least for solar and transmission projects.

The new decision date is also consistent with the freeze being over. A timeline presented at a BLM meeting in September envisioned the final Environmental Impact Statement being issued sometime between the fall of last year and spring of this year, with a record of decision in April. The listed July date would roughly match with the project’s permitting being delayed by two months.

The 60-day renewable permitting pause was one of Trump’s first actions in office and the offshore wind industry especially has continued to bear the brunt of the administration’s anti-renewable wrath.

But solar and transmission appear to be a different story: a Bureau of Land Management spokesperson told Heatmap in March that “there is currently no freeze on processing renewable applications for solar” or for “making authorization decisions.” Earlier that month, BLM had approved a transmission line for a solar project in Southern California saying that the project would “Unleash American Energy.”

Like many large scale Nevada solar projects, the Esmeralda 7 has attracted some opposition from some area residents and conservation groups. The transmission line necessary for the project, Greenlink West, was approved in September.