Many business and commerce routines have been interrupted by COVID-19.
However, one field of commercial development continues to grow, and it’s seeing continued development in western Maricopa County.
Local governments continue to authorize various permits for commercial utility-scale solar facilities. Focused mainly in the southwestern, more flat part of the state, large and smaller facilities continue to be permitted, despite some businesses worldwide struggling to grow during the pandemic.
Some home and business owners, nonprofit organizations and government agencies such as schools have added solar as a way of cutting costs and, in many cases, selling excess electricity to utilities.
The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors recently held hearings on three similar mid-size utility solar facilities to be centered in the southwestern part of the county, south or west of Buckeye.
County spokesman Fields Moseley said there hasn’t been an increase in these types of permit applications, but the flow of applications hasn’t dropped over the past decade or more.
“Our Planning and Development Department doesn’t equate the projects submitted and/or in development to an uptick in these types of applications,” Moseley said.
Why Maricopa County?
There are several reasons the part of Maricopa County outside the Phoenix area is a target for solar developers. Moseley said incentives, low operating costs and proximity to the Phoenix area and other major power plants already existing in the area help to drive the southwestern part of the county to grow.
“Utility-scale solar projects have been common in west Maricopa County for more than 10 years,” Moseley said. “The high solar production potential in the county combined with the ‘switchyard’ near Palo Verde present a great opportunity to distribute electricity regionally.”
Other factors that have made western Maricopa County popular for solar include a state mandate that most utilities get 15% of their power from renewable sources by 2025.
The Arizona Corporation Commission passed that requirement in 2006, and by 2008 utilities such as Arizona Public Service Co. were scrambling to find land providers to get their renewable power.
A natural landing spot was the area west of Buckeye because it already had a proliferation of power plants and transmission lines spurred by Palo Verde Generating Station.
That’s the world’s largest nuclear power plant not located along a natural body of water, according to the generation station’s website.
Located in the unincorporated area of Tonopah, about 10 miles south of I-10 and 45 miles west of downtown Phoenix. It’s the nation’s largest power plant by net generation, supplying electricity to seven utilities across Arizona, Nevada and California.
APS and Salt River Project are two of the plant’s owners who use Palo Verde for plenty of baseload power.
That much power, enough to light 4 million homes, needs a complex and sturdy infrastructure into which solar plants can also feed. The Palo Verde 500-kilovolt switchyard is a key point in the western states power grid, and is used as a reference point in the pricing of electricity across the southwest.
The switchyard is connected to Path 46 — a major set of high-power utility lines that moves large amounts of electricity across the southwest.
One of the recently approved permits is for a facility near Gila Bend. That’s the location of the Solana Generating Station — the first U.S. solar plant with molten salt thermal energy storage.
APS spokesperson Yessica Del Rincon said while the three recently approved smaller facilities in southwestern Maricopa County don’t belong to APS, the utility is not geographically limited on where in the Southwest it could look for solar diversification.
“APS identifies locations for its owned-solar facilities by assessing land availability, cost and proximity near electrical infrastructure to connect to the power grid,” Del Rincon said. “These factors are drivers for providing affordable, reliable and clean electricity to our customers.”
More than 1.3 million homes and businesses in APS service territory benefit from APS’ 10 utility-scale solar sites that make up the “AZ Sun Site” portfolio, Del Rincon said.
“These 10 APS-owned solar plants are located in Maricopa, Pinal, Yavapai and Yuma counties,” she said.
Does the cost of electricity or gas drive solar?
What could potentially drive more solar plants isn’t short-term increases in fuel prices. Moseley said a sudden spike in, say, sweet crude, propane or other fuel commodities is not likely to lead immediately to more large-scale investment in solar facilities. Companies simply don’t want to have all their investment eggs in one basket.
“Short-term rising costs of other energy types seem unlikely to be driving this,” Moseley said. “Rather, utility-scale solar began with energy tax credits and now are sustained as companies diversify their production portfolios.”
At the same time, APS announced plans two years ago to become 100% carbon-free in its energy production by 2050. While nuclear is expected to be a portion of that, large-scale solar also will provide a signification portion.
And that power will be needed far earlier than in nearly 30 years. APS’ goal is to phase in their use of carbon-free technologies, with an effort to get 65% of its power from those sources — and zero power from coal — by 2030. Doing so will take more renewables.
Moseley pointed out the largest types of plants take years to plan and major investments by either wealthy individuals or well-resourced companies or conglomerates.
The Palo Verde plant cost $6 billion to build in 1986. The Solana plant, completed in 2013, cost about $2 billion.
NextEra is investing about $600 million in constructing a 3,000 acre manufacturing and solar-energy gathering facility off of State Route 85 at Riggs Road, on the southern edge of the city. That plant will be located equal distance from both Palo Verde and Solana.
Buckeye and other West Valley cities
In addition to the NextEra facility, some smaller facilities are being built in Buckeye. At 393 square miles, Buckeye is the second-largest city in the state behind Phoenix.
The city still has much more undeveloped real estate available than most other Phoenix suburbs.
Buckeye spokeswoman Annie DeChance said since Jan. 1, 2020, eight commercial photovoltaic (solar) projects were submitted to city’s Development Services. Seven of the eight had permits issued.
“Between 2020 and 2021 the city has seen a slight increase in solar permit submittals,” DeChance said.
Neither Glendale or Surprise — Buckeye’s neighbors, with not nearly as much undeveloped land that isn’t infill — reported any commercial solar applications in 2020 or 2021.
NextEra is among the first of a second wave of new solar companies hoping to make a stand in the region. In December, Goodyear officials announced the European company Meyer Burger had chosen the city to build a solar-component manufacturing facility that will initially produce 250 jobs.
It’s not the first time the West Valley has taken up with the utility solar industry. After the ACC approved the states renewable energy standards in 2006, utilities were scrambling for power sources, and companies were coming here.
In 2020, Goodyear landed Chinese solar manufacturer Suntech Power Holdings Co. Ltd., but that run was short-lived as tariffs on Chinese products pushed the company out of Goodyear in 2013 and eventually out of business.
Other solar companies, like Spain-based Rioglass Solar also had hoped to capitalize on Arizona’s first wave of solar, but it closed its Surprise operations as the slowdown in building occurred.
That slowdown wasn’t as much about Arizona utilities looking for projects but California utilities leveling off. Companies like Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison were that state’s regulators imposed high requirements to get more renewables online.
Many of those initial plants were in western Arizona between Phoenix and Yuma, but after an initial building boom California regulators cracked down on buying renewable power from outside the state, slowing building here.
Jason W. Brooks is a News editor for the Daily Independent and the Chandler Independent.
He covers the Chandler area for both yourvalley.net and the monthly print edition while writing for and assisting in the production of the Daily Independent.
Brooks is a well-traveled journalist who has documented life in small American communities in nearly all U.S. time zones.
Born in Washington, D.C. and raised there and in suburban Los Angeles, he has covered community news in California, New Mexico, Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska and northern Arizona.
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