A solar land rush is rolling across the desert Southwest. Goldman Sachs, utilities PG&E and FPL, Silicon Valley startups, Israeli and German solar firms, Chevron, speculators - all are scrambling to lock up hundreds of thousands of acres of long-worthless land now coveted as sites for solar power plants.
The race has barely begun - finished plants are years away - but it’s blazing fastest in the Mojave, where the federal government controls immense stretches of some of the world’s best solar real estate right next to the nation’s biggest electricity markets. Just 20 months ago only five applications for solar sites had been filed with the BLM in the California Mojave. Today 104 claims have been received for nearly a million acres of land, representing a theoretical 60 gigawatts of electricity. (The entire state of California currently consumes 33 gigawatts annually.)
Related: Solar Thermal in Desert, to Beat Coal by 2020 - Solar Tower Power Generation - Global Wind Power Installed Capacity - real estate investing articles
Comments
1 Comment so far
As these solar companies get more funding from venture capital, private equity, and public markets combined with rising costs of traditional fuels, the land rush will continue. Also solar costs have been coming down which makes the viability of solar as a real energy source more realistic.