Mojave plant in California. Image: Abengoa.

The US Department of Energy had made the Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) project possible through its Loan Guarantee Program; guaranteeing $1.2 billion of project’s $1.6 billion investment.

By Susan Kraemer

Mojave is now the fourth CSP project over 250 MW to come online in the US, and the third using parabolic trough CSP. Of the six US Recovery Act-funded CSP projects to make it through the permitting phase, three have been Abengoa projects; Solana, Mojave and (with BrightSource Energy) Palen. But of them, only Solana, and now Mojave, are online.

As a CSP developer, Abengoa generally has taken the sort of top-down approach to local siting, public relations, permitting and development that is fairly typical in such large firms.

But in an exception; the firm gave Barstow-based Abengoa Solar COO Scott Frier wide latitude to develop the Solana and Mojave projects in his own way.

A veteran of every step of CSP development in the US, including the original SEGS project at Kramer Junction; Frier modestly likens himself to Forest Gump - just lucky to have been around each major step of solar thermal energy history.

He quietly shepherded both projects through siting, permitting and into the construction phase and to power shipment for Solana in 2013, and for Mojave this month.

A chat after a long absence

An unfortunate hallmark of corporate culture can sometimes be a lack of media access to the thinking behind a project's development. But with Mojave now successfully beginning operations, Frier is no longer with Abengoa Solar. So once more free to talk, CSP Today was able to catch up again by phone while he was recuperating from surgery.

As a long-time local desert-area resident, Frier’s local outreach was very different from the more top-down approach by the more distant corporate representatives Abengoa flew in on behalf of Palen - back to the drawing board, after five years of permitting attempts in several configurations.

“I was deadly careful in the initial site selection and most particularly with Mojave, I did not hire any outside PR, but rather favoured a completely grass-roots effort at public education and outreach,” he says. “I met with every party imaginable personally, made all of the sales pitches. Shook all of the hands, and fielded all of the questions.”

Like SolarReserve CEO Kevin Smith, with the 110 MW Crescent Dunes power tower with storage project in Nevada, Frier also was careful to site on private land that was previously disturbed to avoid blowback and environmental concerns.

“But I also was very proactive in reaching out way before any real permitting activities even started with all of the stakeholders and all of the Environmental Advocacies so that I would know all of the concerns before we even drew up plans for the configuration of the plant and all of the individual plans and mitigation proposals,” he explains.

As a result, the Mojave project wound up getting letters of support from almost every environmental advocacy groups, and Frier characterised them as “sitting on our side of the aisle” during the public hearings.

PG&E didn’t need storage

While the option to include storage was available for both, only Arizona Public Service - the off taker for Solana - was interested in including it at that time.

“Either of them could have had storage,” Frier says. “In the situation of the Mojave solar project, the client, PG&E actually didn't find value in storage, because with just contract valuation - what you pay for the kilowatt hour - it wasn’t their cost burden to worry about how to balance the energy, so PG&E just didn’t have an interest.”

Frier believes that future energy storage needs will force a reassessment of the apparently cheaper PV by California regulators when weighing renewable options to meet future renewable requirements closer to 2020 and beyond then. That is because regulators have come to reconsider the relative value of solar with or without storage.

Learning the value of energy story

The CPUC has strict guidelines that tells them what they can and cannot consider when they are approving a contract that a utility signs in terms of whether this is a good economic deal in the public interest. One hidden cost not factored in to decision-making has been that a rating assigned to each type of technology adds a hidden cost to intermittent sources, requiring that they be backed up with reserve capacity.

“So you may be buying a relatively inexpensive photovoltaic megawatt but you've also got to buy a portion of a megawatt of conventional power that can be dispatched immediately at the same time,” he points out.

“When you add the two of those costs together, plus the agony that the CAISO goes through to manage the grid you start coming up with a different composite number for the overall real cost of photovoltaics, compared to the overall cost of CSP with storage.”

The California Independent System Operator (CAISO) is responsible for load-balancing and ensuring that power distribution is appropriately managed with voltage control and for importing electricity or calling a reserve unit online when needed, or calling for curtailments when there is too much online.

“Those poor fellows,” he says. “They’re basically told ‘now make it work’ so they’re the ones who get stuck with whatever is agreed upon by the utilities with really no say-so, and so these are the guys who are starting to be the squeaky wheel because they are to the point where the grid is becoming very difficult to manage.”

“Both the CPUC and the utilities; I think they are now getting that,” he concludes. “And they are also getting the value of potential dispatchable energy, and how storage can detach the timing of energy collection from output and then help to guide output to higher value times of use, and so they are slowly coming around to trying to assign a set value to what that dispatchability means to them, in terms of its value.”

The future of CSP in California

The 2016 sunset of the solar Investment Tax Credit (ITC) of 30% has already curtailed the Recovery Act development of CSP, with its three-year-plus development cycle. Some industry insiders fear that CSP will not be able to grow in the US beyond these first several breakthrough projects, without an ITC extension.

But Frier is actually very confident that California CSP will still be able to attract financing in the future, because of this now very visceral understanding among all the stakeholders of the need for energy storage.

“That is something that is starting to seep in to the energy brain trust,” he explains. “You've got lots of entities, the utilities, the municipalities and ISOs and the CPUC; they are only now starting to get on the same page, and that message is really starting to resonate with all of them in the same way.”

So, though, back before the drought, Mojave was developed without storage, for a utility off taker with abundant hydro storage reserves, it is likely that it will be the last storage-free CSP in California, because now all the stakeholders agree on what its real value is.

“So I think there is very possibly going to be another resurgence of CSP,” he surmises. “And that is absolutely going to be CSP with storage.”