Green Energy Reporter

Spanish companies are developing some of the largest wind and solar farms in the U.S.

If one needed more proof of the ascendancy of the Spanish cleantech sector, then look no further than the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which yesterday announced an MOU with Madrid-based Acciona to develop a $2 billion, 500 megawatts CSP parabolic trough solar facility at Fort Irwin in the sun-drenched California Mojave Desert.

Acciona’s solar unit, Acciona Solar Power, and Arlington, Va.-based Clark Energy Group, a unit of the construction company, Clark Construction Group, will jointly develop the project. The facility will take a long time to develop — it’s not expected to be fully operational until 2022.

The news is yet another indication of the growing dominance of Spanish clean energy developers, which, back in their home market, were able to develop thanks to generous government funding. In fact, Spain’s subsidy program inspired Obama’s own green-focused energy plan.

And there again Spanish companies are coming out as big winners. Over the past month, European companies, particularly Spanish ones like heavyweight Iberdrola, got the lion’s share of the U.S. Department of Energy cash grants, getting nearly half of the $1 billion distributed so far out of the total $3 billion allocated.

The Spanish dominance has ruffled some feathers in Congress, with some members wondering if the grants — all part of the Obama stimulus — would beef up the bottom lines of Spanish companies at the expense of American jobs…

Could Acciona’s latest win lead to a similar backlash? This, after all, is a U.S. Army contract. When the Pentagon awarded a multi-billion contract for refueling airplane tankers to Airbus instead of Boeing, it caused such a backlash that the Pentagon scrapped the contract altogether and recently restarted the bidding process.

To counter potential critics, Acciona executives will likely highlight that its partner on this project is American; It will create U.S.  jobs; It’s also already installed 490 megawatts of wind power across the country’s wind corridor in North Dakota, South Dakota, Illinois and Oklahoma. The company also has projects under development in 15 other U.S. states.

Back to Fort Irwin. Acciona knows the area well after having developed the 64 megawatts Nevada Solar One CSP power facility, which has been operating since 2007 and is located 82 miles (132 kilometers) southeast of Las Vegas.  (The Nevada Solar One parabolic trough system is not to be confused with the original Solar One project in the California Mohave, a Department of Energy pilot project using heliostats and a power tower that operated from 1981 to 1986.)

The new project will sit on a 21 square miles area and produce approximately 1,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity annually That would far exceed Fort Irwin’s demand for electricity, which currently has a peak of 35 megawatts-peak. The company plans to sell the balance of the output to area utilities via long-term power purchase agreements.

We’ve placed a request to talk Alberto de Miguel, development director, Acciona Energy, for more details on the financing of the project. We will update with any new details.

Photo: Courtesy Flickr, Jeff Harris