Isra-Mart srl : World's largest solar project latest to bag US loan guarantees

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Isra-Mart srl news:

The US government has pledged $2.1bn (£1.3bn) in loan guarantees to what will be the world's largest solar power plant, taking its support for solar to just shy of $5bn (£3bn) over the past month.

The Department of Energy (DoE) funding will go towards construction of the first two units of the 7,000 acre Blythe solar thermal plant in California, comprising 484MW of solar thermal capacity. When completed, huge trough-shaped mirrors will heat a liquid into steam to turn turbines and generate electricity for the grid.
The total cost of this first stage is estimated at around $2.8bn (£1.7bn), with the project expected to avoid over 710,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions annually, equivalent to the emissions from over 123,000 vehicles.

But developers Solar Trust of America (STA), a joint venture between German companies Solar Millennium AG and Ferrostaal AG, say that taking the project up to the planned 1GW mark could require investment of up to $6bn (£3.7bn).

The completed facility would then deliver almost 10 per cent of the government's goal of providing 10GW of renewable energy generation on public lands by 2015.

"The Blythe project represents the first step in STA's plan to help drive America's economic recovery with large-scale renewable energy projects that are the first to deliver solar energy to the grid on the same scale as coal and nuclear power projects," said Uwe T. Schmidt, chief executive of STA and chairman of Solar Millennium.

Over the past two weeks the DoE also handed out loan guarantees of $1.6bn (£980m) to BrightSource Energy's Ivanpah project and $1.19bn (£730m) to SunPower Corporation's 250MW California Valley Solar Ranch development.

However, Blythe and the Ivanpah site have both been named in an ongoing lawsuit raised by native American groups, who allege that consent was given to build the plants without proper consideration of environmental impact assessments.