“Things have turned so sour for solar power tower technology that in August, the company behind the only power tower project being proposed for the state of California announced it wants to build the plant using a different technology.”
That’s according to Santiago Seage, chief executive of the Spanish-owned Abengoa Solar, which owns the embattled project. Seage told the trade journal Recharge News that without an extension of the federal Investment Tax Credit for solar plants, his company won’t have the security it needs to invest in building the project.
Though the Obama administration has recently renewed its commitment to approve more wind facilities on public lands as part of the Climate Action Plan it released this week, a new study indicates that wind development in California has far fewer benefits than it does elsewhere in the United States.
With Friday’s cancellation of one of the biggest solar projects proposed for the California desert, the utility-scale solar boom of 2009 continues to falter. And analysts deep in the energy industry are taking notice.
California’s unemployment rate tumbled to 8.6% in May from 9% in April, falling to its lowest level since November 2008, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday.
The developer of a huge proposed solar power project that was once slated to cover 12.5 square miles of still-intact desert habitat has walked away from the idea, according to documents released by the California Energy Commission (CEC). The Calico Solar Project, proposed for land north of Interstate 40 between the hamlets of Ludlow and Newberry Springs, attracted opposition even from die-hard supporters of desert solar projects.