Riverside County, California, US

The proposed 750MW McCoy Solar Project is another step closer to being realised after the Governor of California Edmund Brown certified the project as complying with  the Jobs and Economic Improvement Act of 2011, enabling the project to be fast-tracked for a judicial and legislative review.

The 750MW project will represent one of the largest PV projects on public lands in the Californian desert and will be developed, owned and operated by McCoy Solar, a subsidiary of NextEra Energy Resources, on 1,780 hectares of land, the majority of which is managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in Riverside County.

The US$100 million project will be built in two phases. As part of the array, a 14.5 mile generation tie-in line and 0.8 hectares switch yard connecting with Southern California Edison’s Colorado River Substation will be built. During peak construction, McCoy Solar believes that the project will hire 600 workers and up to 20 workers during operations.

Output from the proposed project is estimated to be enough to power around 200,000 Californian households. Electricity generated from the first 250MW of the facility will be sold to Southern California Edison under a power purchase agreement with McCoy Solar.