The company vying to build a 247-megawatt solar farm in Panoche recently submitted a draft supplemental environmental impact report addressing plans to address impacts under a revised, reduced proposal.
PV2 Energy filed the supplemental draft EIR on Dec. 23. The prior company overseeing the project, Solargen Energy, had an initial EIR approved by the county board in late 2010.
PV2 submitted the supplemental draft—the public comment period is open until Feb. 10—to address changes to the project such as its reduced scope, a more condensed but intensified construction schedule, and variations in water use. That latest draft EIR comes after PV2’s August announcement that it secured a power purchase agreement—the last, major step in the process—with Southern California Edison.
Primarily prompting the need for a revised draft EIR were clarifications with transmission lines, said Byron Turner, interim director of planning for the county. According to the supplemental draft document, Pacific Gas & Electric identified necessary upgrades to transmission lines resulting from changes to the project.
“It was really all about the details of the transmission lines and such were not flushed out in the original document,” Turner said.
He said PV2 informed the county of the changes, and government officials deemed it necessary to submit the supplemental draft.
For Jerry Muenzer, the District 4 supervisor representing the Panoche area, it is crucial to have the project spur economic activity while he underscored how PV2 is committed to paying local sales taxes and paying the county’s share of the property taxes for panels.
“Having met with them, they’re still committed to hiring locally,” Muenzer said.
Muenzer said he was uncertain on the status of a separate environmental review by the federal government, while the supplemental EIR draft submitted to the county lists off an array of species potentially affected by the transmission line part of the project such as the tiger salamander, blunt-nosed leopard lizard, burrowing owl, kangaroo rat, San Joaquin antelope squirrel, American badger and San Joaquin kit fox, along with wetlands impacts.
The agreement with the Panoche Valley project is for 247 megawatts over 20 years, with an expectation to be online by 2019. As recent as late 2013, the project was planned for 339 megawatts.
Solargen Energy first proposed the Panoche Valley project in 2009, but when the company ran into financial problems in 2011, PV2 bought the assets for the project. Duke Energy Renewables, part of the largest utility company in the country, formed a partnership with PV2 to oversee the project.
With the initial proposal, there was talk of building a 1,000-megawatt solar farm on up to 30,000 acres. Under the current plans, PV2 would build a 247-megawatt facility on 2,506 acres.
The supplemental draft EIR prepared by San Francisco-based Aspen Environmental Group highlighted the following changes in the revision, among others:
• The project footprint and overall disturbance area have been reduced, resulting in a larger on-site conservation area for species conservation.
• There will be an accelerated construction scheduled, with one 18-month phase as opposed to a five-year construction rollout.
• The accelerated schedule will mean the number of daily workers to and from the project working at the site would go from 200 per day to 550.
• The applicant is proposing to increase the amount of water used during the temporary construction period. Due to the reduced project size, the amount of water used for washing panels would go down.
• The applicant is proposing to build temporary construction water ponds and three temporary water tanks near existing or new wells.
• Permanent, on-site access roads would be eliminated, with dirt paths between rows of panels used as transportation corridors for maintenance.
