News about Solar, Wind and alternative green power technologies

In keeping with a government mandate to reduce energy consumption, the US army has agreed to terms with Irwin Security Partners to construct a two billion dollar, five hundred megawatt [MW] solar energy power plant based at Fort Irwin and the Mojave desert of California.

Via an enhanced use lease [EUL], the Army Corp of Engineers will be leasing 14000 acres at Fort Irwin to Irwin Energy Security Partners in a venture jointly managed by ACCIONA Solar Power out of Henderson, Nevada and the Clark Energy Group from Bethesda, Maryland. Financed and constructed by the venture partners, they will also be responsible for delivering eventual services such as operations and maintenance to the Army in quid pro quo for the military land lease. Any power left unused by the Fort Irwin base a can be resold to commercial power grid suppliers by two large transmission lines located near the base.

The Department of Defense claims the Ft. Irwin base solar power project will be its largest installation of solar technology, far out sizing the fourteen MW solar plant at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada or the two MW project at Ft Carson in Colorado.

Army technologists will be choosing five sites where power installations will be set up. The solar project at the Ft. Irwin Base is scalable up to one thousand MW at a time to be determined later on. The DoD expects the initial stage of the installation to be completed in 2014, providing Ft Irwin with enough power to sustain itself. The Ft. Irwin installation will be utilizing concentrated solar thermal and photovoltaic technology.

The Fort Irwin project initiation follows what was an intense bidding war begun in March by the novel group called the US Army’s Senior Energy Council which was formed in the fall of 2008 to provide oversight for a sustainable energy policy designed to locate alternative power supplies, realize more energy savings and to find energy supplies required by US Army compounds, personnel and transportation services among certain other holdings.

The government mandate requires that the US Army decrease its use of energy by thirty percent by 2015 and that one quarter of all its power requirements are using renewable energy solutions by the year 2025. By utilizing the EUL scenario private companies are able to acquire land which is underused on military bases as well as other Department of Defense Facilities. This new five hundred MW solar project is predicted to generate roughly one thousand Gigawatt hours [GWh] yearly, which well exceeds Fort Irwin’s thirty Five MW top usage.

Fort Irwin is a sprawling military base with five thousand recruits turning out each month. It also houses NASA’s Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex with antennas poised for communicating into space during missions.