Red state or blue state - which is best for CSP?
Politically, the US is divided, between ‘red’ or Republican-run states, with few permitting restrictions, but also no policy incentives to build clean energy, and the ‘blue’ states run by Democrats, with high state requirements for clean energy, but rigorous permitting to build it.
Despite being on the cutting edge of CSP with both power tower technology and ten hours of thermal energy storage in molten salts, SolarReserve’s 110MW Crescent Dunes power tower project in Nevada completely escaped NIMBY opposition, and was permitted without difficulty.
Locating in Nevada helped. Like most of the sparsely populated states, Nevada is red. Permitting there is very simple and straightforward.
“In Nevada we just have the Public Utility Commission. You file with them, and then you file with them again once you're done with your federal process, and it goes through much quicker,” says Greg Helseth, who is in charge of renewable permits at the Nevada office of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM).
“We don't have CEQA,” he says. “We don't have the California Energy Commission rules and guidelines and meetings and interveners and all of that.”
Blue state regulatory impediments
By contrast, attempting to permit tower CSP in blue state California has been a nightmare.
As an example of California’s exacting requirements, the California Energy Commission (CEC) docket list for SolarReserve’s similar Rice power tower in California shows its permit took 165 documents filed with the CEC over two years.
Ivanpah’s tower CSP took 188 filings over three years. And Palen has already surpassed over 600 documents filed since its redesign from trough to power tower in 2010, and is still battling on, four years later.
And the CEC is just one of the California agencies that a power tower CSP project must clear in order to build.
SolarReserve CEO Kevin Smith agrees with Helseth. “It’s probably four times the cost to permit in California than in Nevada,” he says.
“Whether you're permitting a power plant, or a building, or a road, or a transmission line or pipeline, California is without question, the toughest permitting regime in the world.”
Smith says that while Rice cleared the CEC process in one of the quickest permits in California, in total, it took about the same time as permitting Crescent Dunes in Nevada. But Nevada, on public lands, also needed full federal permits. Rice, on private land, did not.
“As the manager of the land, I just take care of the space that's available and take it through the permitting process,” says Helseth, who has permitted nearly 2GW of renewables on BLM land in Nevada Renewable Energy Coordination Office (RECO).
“Although not everything that our BLM RECO approved has gone online,” he cautions.
Of course, things can go wrong anywhere. Financing can prove difficult. Utilities can balk at the longer lead times to build CSP. At this point, any new CSP project depends on congress extending the Investment Tax Credit (ITC) past 2016.
(In the hands of America’s currently Republican-dominated congress, extending the ITC looks unlikely, but if it happens, it would be in the final weeks of the year. Then 2017 looks like the next Democratic congress.)
Site in a red state - near a blue state
Yet Helseth sees more CSP - especially with storage - ultimately being developed in Nevada, despite its small population, low demand and nearly non-existent clean energy legislation - because it is next to California.
Not only is there plenty of land in areas with good DNI in Nevada, but an 84 percent of the state is publicly owned, and 64 percent of that is controlled by the BLM. With so much empty land available with transmission; it makes sense to transport power over the border.
California is where the power is needed. “Nevada is evolving to be a supplier of energy to California. There are projects in Nevada which specifically supply California with power,” he explains.
NIMBYs and solar developers shared vision
Part of the reason that California takes so much time and expense to permit desert solar is the well lawyered-up NIMBY opponents in the wealthy enclaves of Southern California.
Yet ironically, there is something of a shared environmental consciousness that underlies both the NIMBY groups that oppose solar in California, and the firms that attempt to build clean energy there.
Making energy can’t get much cleaner than reflecting sunlight to boil water, after all, as Ivanpah does.
And Ivanpah’s owners seem to be as genuinely committed to protecting desert wildlife as their worst opponents.
“During the permitting and commissioning, we had 160 site biologists that were under our employment during the construction period,” says Jeff Holland, speaking for NRG Energy, which co-owns Ivanpah along with partners Google and BrightSource, its developer.
“Right now we have 25 biologists who are responsible for all the wildlife on site. They have specialties in different areas. A lot of them are still there for care of our tortoise pen and juvenile desert tortoises. We are caring for them until they reach sexual maturity and so that’s at least three years. Our other biologists look after our flora and fauna and monitor some of the other wildlife on site, such as kit foxes and bobcats.”
These 25 biologists are in addition to the dog-handlers employed by the independent contracting environmental firm that BrightSource and NRG Energy hired as required by California regulators; H.T. Harvey & Associates, to assess avian mortality and provide a tally to the CEC.
“They have several different teams of dogs throughout the month to come in and conduct the searches as part of the avian and bat monitoring,” Holland says. Now that Ivanpah is operational those studies are continuing. “It's just the right thing to do,” he says.
Holland is very comfortable with why there is this level of scrutiny. The Avian & Bat Monitoring Plan; 2013-2014 Winter Report is one example.
Groundbreaking solar technology
“You know nothing on this scale has ever been attempted with this type of technology before so we’re in a new area in terms of research. And so a lot of the work that's been done in collecting the information on avian species and luminescence will feed the science and be available for future projects.”
“Prior to construction, we used the information that was available to us and conducted our own scientific studies in working with the appropriate state and federal agencies, and were able to come up with recommendations which were implemented during construction,” says Holland.
“Since this was such an innovative and new endeavour we didn’t have the luxury of being able to look back on other similar CSP projects and benchmark what they did, to use for Ivanpah, because it simply didn’t exist. We are doing ground-breaking and exhaustive studies and applying those learnings every day.”
Yet at this point, it is far from certain that the CEC will ultimately permit the next power tower, Palen. And if they don’t, given the gargantuan effort it took, it’s unlikely that anyone else will take a run at developing the next power tower in California.
Yet, by 2020, the need for tower CSP’s cheap storage for load shifting solar PV will have become critical.
“I think California would be doing themselves a huge disservice if they didn't permit CSP projects with storage, because that means their other choices are conventional fuels or PV,” says Smith.
“PV without storage is intermittent, and 4 o'clock in the afternoon, it's gone. So if California is not willing to permit additional CSP then they are going to permit additional conventional fuel projects. Natural gas is probably the only alternative. You're not getting a coal plant or a nuclear plant permitted in California. And natural gas means pipelines and emissions risks.” But one risk natural gas does not have is permitting risk. Natural gas projects get permitted promptly. California NIMBYs don’t attempt to derail CEC permits for natural gas.