{"id":331313,"date":"2010-02-17T07:48:44","date_gmt":"2010-02-17T12:48:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.earthportal.org\/news\/?p=3126"},"modified":"2010-02-17T07:48:44","modified_gmt":"2010-02-17T12:48:44","slug":"tree-deal-clears-the-way-for-southwest-farm-plan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/331313","title":{"rendered":"Tree deal clears the way for Southwest farm plan"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>Greenwire<\/a>: Developer NextEra Energy Resources LLC has struck a deal with the California Energy Commission that will allow it to move forward with stalled plans for a proposed solar plant in California City.<\/p>\n

The proposed 250-megawatt Beacon Solar Energy Project had been mired in a war over water needed to cool the plant for the past year.<\/p>\n

Residents in the arid region east of Bakersfield were concerned that the solar farm would drain their aquifer<\/a>, but NextEra’s latest plans involve cutting down hundreds of local water-hungry tamarisk trees to pave the way for the solar power plant’s initial water needs.<\/p>\n

The plan may provide a roadmap for resolving similar environmental disputes over dozens of other proposed solar farms in the desert.<\/p>\n

“The water that normally would go into the tamarisk will go down into the basin — it’s a big environmental win,” said Michael Bevins, California City’s public works director. An acre of invasive tamarisks can consume 1 million gallons of water each year, said Tim Carlson, research and policy director for the Tamarisk Coalition, a Grand Junction, Colo., nonprofit group working to eradicate the trees.<\/p>\n

The Beacon proposal is still in the planning stages, and it is still unclear how many trees would be removed and just how much water would be saved.<\/p>\n

NextEra expects to eventually cool the plant using treated wastewater but would need to draw freshwater in its early stages (Todd Woody, Los Angeles Times<\/em><\/a>, Feb. 16). – DFM<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Greenwire: Developer NextEra Energy Resources LLC has struck a deal with the California Energy Commission that will allow it to move forward with stalled plans for a proposed solar plant in California City. The proposed 250-megawatt Beacon Solar Energy Project had been mired in a war over water needed to cool the plant for the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4055,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-331313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4055"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=331313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331313\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=331313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=331313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=331313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}