The U.S. Department of the Interior's Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has approved two solar projects with a combined capacity of 465 megawatts to be developed by Clearway Energy near the heart of the desert in eastern California's Riverside County.
Clearway Energy has started construction on the 265 MW Arica Solar Project and the 200 MW Victory Pass Solar Project. The projects will have 400 MW of battery energy storage (BESS).
The approvals for the two projects are said to support the government's efforts to modernize the power infrastructure in the west and allow for at least 25 GW of solar, wind and geothermal power on public lands over the next three years.
In a recent statement, BLM announced that the two projects will be executed against a total infrastructure investment of $689 million to generate annual economic benefits of $5.9 million.
The Arica and Victory Pass solar project will power 132,000 homes.
The Arica and Victory Pass projects are the first two clean projects BLM deems suitable for renewable energy development under the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Program (DRECP).
"BLM is committed to making a significant contribution to the nation's renewable energy portfolio and has approved more than 120 renewable energy projects on public lands generating more than 12,000 megawatts," said BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning.
BLM manages more than 245 million acres of public lands, primarily in 12 western states. The agency currently handles 67 utility-scale onshore clean energy projects on these lands, including interconnected power generation links critical to proposed clean projects on non-federal lands.
Solar, geothermal and wind projects have the potential to add more than 41,733 megawatts of clean energy to the western grid.
Last month, the U.S. Department of Energy issued a request for information to gather public input on the structure of the $2.5 billion Transmission Enhancement Program.
The U.S. government is also aggressively increasing solar installations in the country, which fell 243% year-on-year to 3.9 GW in the first quarter of 2022, compared to 5 GW in the first quarter of 2021. However, solar accounted for 50% of the electricity added to the U.S. grid in the first quarter of 2022.
