Solar panels planted as water dries up
MARICOPA, Calif. — Jon Reiter banked the four-seat Cessna aircraft hard to the right, angling to get a better look at the solar panels glinting in the afternoon sun far below.
The silvery panels looked like an interloper amid a patchwork landscape of lush almond groves, barren brown dirt and saltbush scrub, framed by the blue-green strip of the California Aqueduct bringing water from the north. Reiter, a renewable energy developer and farmer, built these solar panels and is working to add a lot more to the San Joaquin Valley landscape.
“The next project is going to be 100 megawatts. It’s going to be five times this size,” Reiter said.
Solar energy projects could replace some of the jobs and tax revenues that may be lost as constrained water supplies force California’s agriculture industry to scale back. In the San Joaquin Valley alone, farmers may need to take more than half a million acres out of production to comply with the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which will ultimately put restrictions on pumping. Converting farmland to solar farms also could be critical to meeting California’s climate change targets. That’s according to a new report from the Nature Conservancy, an environmental nonprofit.
Working with the consulting firm Energy and Environmental Economics, the conservancy tried to figure out how California could satisfy its appetite for clean energy without destroying ecologically sensitive lands across the American West. The report lays out possible answers to one of the big questions facing renewable energy: Which areas should be dedicated to solar panels and wind turbines, and which areas should be protected for the sake of wildlife, outdoor recreation, farming and grazing?
One takeaway from the report, released this week: California will need hundreds or maybe thousands of square miles of solar power production in the coming decades — and it would make sense to build onethird to one-half of that solar capacity on agricultural lands, mostly within the state.
In part, that’s because the Central Valley is more ecologically degraded than California’s inland deserts, where bighorn sheep, desert tortoises and golden eagles still roam across vast stretches of largely intact wilderness. The San Joaquin Valley is home to two dozen threatened and endangered species, but the landscape was almost totally reshaped by agriculture long ago.
California has plenty of farmland that could be converted to solar panels without harming the state’s $50-billion agriculture industry, clean energy advocates say. A previous report identified 470,000 acres of “least-conflict” lands in the San Joaquin Valley, where salty soil, poor drainage or otherwise less-than-ideal farming conditions could make solar an attractive alternative for landowners.
At least 13,000 acres of solar farms have already been built in the valley, according to Erica Brand, director of the Nature Conservancy’s California energy program and a co-author of the newly released “Power of Place” report. “It’s a region with tremendous opportunity to advance multi-benefit solar projects,” Brand said.
Building solar and saving species
For an increasing number of farmers, solar makes economic sense. At Maricopa Orchards — a major Fresno-based grower of almonds, oranges and other crops — Reiter hatched a plan to build solar panels on thousands of acres of agricultural land in Kern County.
He worked with local officials to create a 6,000-acre habitat conservation plan, which allows solar panels on 4,000 acres of the company’s land and sets aside 2,000 additional acres for environmental mitigation. The mitigation lands are now reverting back to habitat for San Joaquin kit foxes, blunt-nosed leopard lizards, burrowing owls and other atrisk species. Reiter’s vision is a work in progress: So far, only 160 acres have been developed with solar. The 20-megawatt Maricopa West solar project was built by the German company E.ON and sold to Dominion Energy of Virginia, on land adjacent to almond orchards.
But Reiter, who served as Maricopa Orchards’ chief executive until earlier this year and is now a senior adviser to the company, said he’s negotiating with three developers looking to build seven more solar projects. Part of the benefit of the habitation conservation plan, Reiter said, is that Maricopa can offer solar companies “shovel-ready” construction sites with permits and mitigation lands ready to go, saving them time and money. Endangered species also stand to benefit from the habitat plan.
“There’s going to be artificial dens, movement corridors and things of that nature. The idea is that it’s going to help them survive,” Reiter said.
Other Central Valley agricultural powerhouses have their own plans for solar.
Wonderful Co. — which grows tree nuts and owns Pom Wonderful, Fiji Water and Justin Wines — is aiming to power its operations with 100% renewable electricity by 2025. Wonderful opened its first solar project in 2007 and this year signed a contract with Florida-based developer Nextera Energy for a 23-megawatt solar installation, to be built on 157 acres of fallow farmland.
Wonderful sees “tremendous potential for siting solar on agricultural land,” said Steven Swartz, the company’s vice president of strategy. Wonderful, owned by Beverly Hills billionaires Stewart and Lynda Resnick, can make about as much money producing solar power over a 30-year period, Swartz said, as it can growing almonds and pistachios, two of the most lucrative crops grown in California.