Yesterday NextEra Energy Resources and its partners announced that they have commissioned the Blythe and McCoy Solar Energy Centers, two enormous PV plants in Southern California which together comprise 485 MW-AC of capacity.
The projects comprise more than 4 million PV modules, including both First Solar’s cadmium telluride thin film PV modules and crystalline silicon modules mounted on single-axis trackers, sitting on more than 6 square miles of public land managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). First Solar also provided engineering, procurement and construction services for 250 MW-AC of the McCoy project.
The electricity from these projects will be sold to Southern California Edison and Kaiser Permanente.
Blythe and McCoy are some of the last in the breed of mega-projects in the U.S. Southwest. Very few projects this large have been built during the last few years, as the industry has largely switched to small- to mid-sized utility-scale solar.
Fewer of these projects are being built on public lands, following a number of lawsuits from conservationists versed in California and national environmental laws.
This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.
By submitting this form you agree to pv magazine using your data for the purposes of publishing your comment.
Your personal data will only be disclosed or otherwise transmitted to third parties for the purposes of spam filtering or if this is necessary for technical maintenance of the website. Any other transfer to third parties will not take place unless this is justified on the basis of applicable data protection regulations or if pv magazine is legally obliged to do so.
You may revoke this consent at any time with effect for the future, in which case your personal data will be deleted immediately. Otherwise, your data will be deleted if pv magazine has processed your request or the purpose of data storage is fulfilled.
Further information on data privacy can be found in our Data Protection Policy.