10/31/2009 4:25:00 PM County moves to first solar power plant
By Bruce Colbert Contributing Reporter/Daily Courier
PRESCOTT - About 15 miles southwest of Holbrook along State Route 377, an unusual site greets motorists - a wind farm sprouting 412-foot turbines.
Wind farms themselves are not unusual, or new. Some states, California for example, have been building alternative energy plants such as wind and solar for years. But in Arizona, the Dry Lake Wind Power Project is the state's first commercial wind power farm.
Why would a Spanish company, Iberdrola Renewables, build its 30 wind machines in Navajo County rather than, say, Yavapai County? Because that part of the state has consistent wind and Yavapai County does not.
"We get a lot of wind in some places, sometimes, but we get a lot more sun than we do wind," said Mike Siavelis, owner of Sunrise Energy Alternatives in Dewey.
The Wind Energy Resource Atlas of the United States classifies a region's wind power with a rating of one through seven - one averaging 4 miles per hour or less and seven averaging 9 mph or faster.
The wind atlas rates Yavapai County a solid one. The county gets wind, and powerful wind at times, but not consistent or fast enough to interest wind energy companies.
Iberdrola built its $100 million Dry Lake wind farm in one of the few areas in the state with an atlas wind rating of three or greater. Turbines start producing power when the wind hits 7 miles per hour; at 55 miles per hour brakes stop the spinning blades.
Although the county may lack enough wind for a wind plant, it does not lack the sunshine for a solar plant. With President Barack Obama's alternative energy grants and tax breaks, "alternative energy" is the latest buzzword for power companies looking for places to build energy plants.
Money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act helped Iberdrola build the Dry Lake project.
"We're very happy with what has happened in the economic stimulus package," said Jan Johnson, an Iberdrola spokeswoman.
Solar on horizon
"I am very much encouraging solar power companies to look at us," District 1 Supervisor Carol Springer said. "With the number of days of sunshine we have (an average of 300 days each year according to the University of Arizona Institutional Repository) and plenty of open land to build on, we're in a great position for solar energy companies."
Sven Nelson thinks so. He is a managing partner with U.S. Energy Partners, LLC, and he has spent the past year getting serious about building a solar energy plant on 500 acres near Seligman.
"We have done a fair amount of work studying the area and talking to property owners and Arizona Public Service," Nelson said. "We've modeled the site, done the preliminary analysis, and we've started talking about financing."
If all goes well, Nelson expects to start building a 50-megawatt plant in two to three years. He said it would take about a year to build and "get power into the grid."
Once construction starts, Nelson said U.S. Energy likely would hire about 100 employees, with most of the management corps coming from existing company staff.
"I'm very much in favor (of alternative energy) but the devil's in the details," District 3 Supervisor Chip Davis said. He added that he has "a few proposals" in the Verde Valley.
"I don't want some out-of-state company using our land mass and resources and then shipping out the energy to some other state," he said. "If they build here, who gets the energy, would it actually generate local jobs and what's their water consumption?"
Davis brings up the dark side of solar energy - water.
Water
Solar power plants are profitable in regions that receive plenty of year-round sunshine. Unfortunately, the same regions usually receive little to no year-round rainfall.
U.S. Energy wants to build a photovoltaic (PV) solar power plant at its Seligman-area site. That is good news for Yavapai County.
PV plants are similar to the rooftop solar systems found on houses. A photovoltaic plant's water use is a drop in the bucket compared to power companies' emerging trend of concentrating solar power (CSP) plants.
According to a U.S. Department of Energy report, four types of solar technology comprise the bulk of recently built CSPs: parabolic troughs; linear Fresnel; dish/engine; and power towers. All four use the sun to generate heat to power thermal turbines.
For example, a power tower is an obelisk tower as tall as 500 feet. Solar panels arrayed around the base of the tower focus reflected sunlight onto the tower where it boils water and produces steam.
Solar panels in a PV system convert the sun's rays directly to energy, in the same manner as a solar-powered calculator, and send it out to a power grid. A concentrating solar power plant, depending on its size, could use as many as hundreds of millions of gallons of water per year.
CSPs are more efficient than photovoltaic systems, but they consume enormous amounts of water to make steam and to cool the machinery.
This past year, for example, residents at Amargosa Valley, Nev., welcomed a German company called Solar Millennium that wanted to build two large solar farms and promised to create hundreds of jobs.
As of today, the future of the plants remains in limbo.
Residents, however, reversed their welcome when the company said it would need about 1.3 billion gallons of water per year to cool its thermal turbines - 20 percent of the valley's entire water supply.
Nelson said he estimates U.S. Energy's 50-megawatt plant would use about 10,000 gallons of distilled water per year, which they would buy and haul from a water company.
According to City of Prescott water officials, most single-family home bills show that the average Prescott household uses between 3,000 and 10,000 gallons of water per month.
"The only thing we need water for is to clean the panels," Nelson said. "And we need distilled water for that."
Land
Wind and solar farms need a lot of land for solar panels and windmills.
Iberdrola plans to build 209 more turbines at its Dry Lake project. If the company builds them, the 239 turbines will spread 15 miles across the open land.
"I'm in favor of solar farms and fields," District 2 Supervisor Tom Thurman said. "What I'm against is if the companies want to come in here and rip out Saguaro cacti or chop down pine tree forests to build them."
Losing a county's view shed is a real fear among rural and urban residents. Power companies, used to waving money and jobs at government officials in the past, know that they no longer may have carte blanche to uninhabited lands.
Customers
Alternative energy companies share the same goal as a nuclear power plant or coal-burning plant - make a profit. To do that, a company needs customers.
Nelson thinks U.S. energy will have enough customers, including possibly APS, to make a profit at the Seligman plant.
Rebecca Wilder, spokeswoman for the Arizona Corporation Commission, said legislation mandates that in 2010, 2.5 percent of a public utility company's power supply must come from renewable energy sources.
That means small solar and wind companies such as U.S. Energy are courting APS and Salt River Project to be customers. The utility company mandate tops out at 15 percent in 2025.
Although Yavapai County officials do not have an economic development program, they do have tools to lure alternative energy companies to the county.
"We can relax zoning laws to attract them," Thurman said.
"We try to set rules and regulations to make it conducive to the businesses," Springer said.
"One thing we have to do to get our economy going again, is to be less dependent on construction jobs," Thurman said.
