The desert county in the so-called Inland Empire east of Los Angeles is the site of some of the biggest solar installations planned for the Golden State, including Solar Millennium’s 1,000-megawatt Blythe solar thermal project and First Solar’s 550-megawatt Desert Sunlight photovoltaic farm.
As Tiffany Hsu reports in the Los Angeles Times on Tuesday, the Riverside board of supervisors is considering a 2% tax on each solar project’s annual revenues to offset the impact of power plants that will occupy many square miles of federal land in the county.
Writes Hsu:
More than 185 square miles in the county is set to be blanketed in mirrors. Those projects could strain local roads, bridges, law enforcement and medical services, the county said.
"We're just saying that when we're left with all the impacts of development, give us a little something back for the imposition on our county," said Riverside County Supervisor John J. Benoit, who is backing the measure.
Predictably, solar developers are not amused.
Jim Woodruff, the First Solar executive in charge of government affairs, told Hsu that such a tax on Desert Sunlight would cost his company $3.5 million a year, totaling $100 million over the project’s life. And unions, desperate for the hundreds of construction jobs the projects would create in a subprime county where the building industry collapsed during the Great Recession, vowed to oppose the local levy.
The tax proposal comes at a tricky time for First Solar. The Arizona solar powerhouse is awaiting word on whether Desert Sunlight and two of its other California projects will receive federal loan guarantees from a rapidly diminishing pot of cash. The loan guarantee program that has proven critical to financing Big Solar projects is set to sunset on September 30.
Of course, if the projects never get built, there won’t be anything to tax.
