The move is part of a drive to identify public land across six western states which would be suitable for renewable schemes, forms part of President Obama‘s ‘all of the above' energy mix strategy and is one of the final acts of the outgoing Secretary of State, who announced last week that he will return to his Senate seat in Colorado by the end of March.
The designated land, mostly former agricultural areas, has been identified after a three-year environmental analysis which ruled out sites with special wildlife, historic or cultural significance.
Any utility-scale schemes on such land would still be liable to environmental studies on an individual basis but the strategy aims to point developers towards suitable tracts of land for large-scale projects and the Arizona scheme includes the 2,550-acre Agua Caliente Solar Energy Zone.
It is estimated Agua Caliente, the third solar zone on public land in Arizona and the 18th nationwide, could generate up to 20 MW of solar energy at the site in Yama County, near Dateland.
Popular content
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.
Share
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.