U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar
activated today a 50-megawatt power plant that was developed by
First Solar Inc. (FSLR) and is the the first on U.S. public land.
The Silver State North project in Nevada’s Ivanpah Valley,
south of Las Vegas, is owned by Enbridge Inc. (ENB), Canada’s largest
oil-pipeline company, and generates enough electricity for about
9,000 homes, according to a statement today.
The U.S. Interior Department has approved 29 wind, solar
and geothermal projects on public land since 2009 as part of
President Barack Obama’s “all-of-the-above” energy strategy,
Salazar said. With Silver State, the U.S. is on pace to install
10,000 megawatts of non-hydroelectric renewable power capacity
by this year, three years earlier than mandated by Congress.
“Today is a landmark for America, a landmark for the solar
industry and a landmark for how we use our public lands,”
Salazar said in a speech dedicating the project. “We are making
believers out of skeptics. A lot of people would have said three
years ago that this day would never come.”
The agency has approved 16 solar projects with 5,636
megawatts of capacity, eight geothermal plants with 424
megawatts and five wind farms with capacity of 548 megawatts.
The Interior Department plans to review 17 additional proposals
this year for about 7,000 megawatts.
Silver State North is one of four projects First Solar is
developing on public land, Alan Bernheimer, a spokesman for the
Tempe, Arizona-based company, said today in a telephone
interview. The 550-megawatt Desert Sunlight Solar Farm under
construction in Riverside County, California, is expected to
begin producing electricity by 2015.
Two others, the 300-megawatt Stateline Solar Farm in
California and the 300-megawatt Silver State South, are in
permitting, Bernheimer said. First Solar is the world’s largest
producer of thin-film solar panels.
To contact the reporter on this story:
Justin Doom in New York at
jdoom1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Reed Landberg at
landberg@bloomberg.net