Why Green Groups Are Unhappy with Apple’s Big Solar Buy

on February 11, 2015 at 10:00 AM

<> on January 27, 2015 in San Francisco, California.

Is that massive Apple solar play that made news on Tuesday burnishing the tech titan’s green cred? It might be, but environmentalists aren’t thrilled about the whole thing.

Not that they’ve got anything against Apple – or solar power, they say.

Kim Delfino is California director of the group Defenders of Wildlife, an organization that has backed California’s aggressive policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But in an interview, Delfino said the 2,900-acre, 280-megawatt California Flats project that First Solar is pursuing in Monterey County – and which Apple is helping make happen with an $848 million, 130-megawatt, 25-year power purchase agreement – raises serious concerns.

“We’re urging developers to do projects on degraded and disturbed land,” Delfino said, “and unfortunately, this project is on beautiful, open, largely intact land.”

In comments submitted during the Monterey County project approval process, Defenders of Wildlife joined with the California Native Plant Society, Audubon California, Center for Biological Diversity and local chapters of the Sierra Club and Audubon to raise objections to California Flats.

“Clearly the number of rare, endangered and sensitive species that have been documented on the project site and the additional number of rare, endangered and sensitive species that have potential to occur on the site, makes this proposed project area unsuitable for solar development,” the groups said.

First Solar is planning to build the power plant in the extreme southeastern corner of Monterey County. If “Monterey” conjures images of Cannery Row and Pebble Beach, reboot, friend; this is a whole other world, sun-splashed and often-parched grazing land just a few ripples in the earth’s crust from the Central Valley. It’s pretty remote, though not without a footnote in history: Sixty years ago at the junction of Highways 41 and 46, five or ten miles down Turkey Flat Road from the First Solar site, a Cal Poly student named Donald Turnipseed crossed the center line in his Ford Tudor, putting him in the path of a Porsche 550 Spyder driven by the actor James Dean, who died at the scene of the crash.

On its website, First Solar says the project site, a small portion of a 72,000-acre working cattle ranch, “is strategically located to minimize environmental impacts, and is not visible from any public gathering points or majors roads.” And in the final environmental impact report, the county says the solar panels would go up “in an area that has been under an active grazing regime for many years.” Further, the county says, “the project site does not consist of specifically sensitive or high quality native habitat.”

But the environmental groups point to a long roster of critters who could be harmed by the project, and their poster species might be the endangered San Joaquin kit fox, a little cutie described by Defenders of Wildlife as “the size of a housecat, with big ears, a long bushy tail and furry toes that help to keep it cool in its hot and dry Central Valley environment.”

kit fox

Endangered San Joaquin kit fox. Photo credit: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

And then there’s the federally protected golden eagle, also partial to the terrain. “There’s a huge number of golden eagles there,” Delfino said. “There are at least 17 eagle nests in the vicinity.”

Delfino said that while it was her wish that the plant not be built there, First Solar “is pretty far into the process” – the Monterey County Planning Commission approved the project in January, unanimously – so the group’s best hope might be to “minimize and mitigate the damage.” While questioning various aspects of the assessment of the project’s impact, the environmental groups also called for an increase in the compensatory habitat set aside by the developer, from a 3:1 acreage ratio to at least 5:1.

Delfino said Defenders of Wildlife would continue to make its concerns heard as First Solar moves ahead on federal and state permits related to the endangered species impacted by the proposed development, and as the Army Corps of Engineers assesses the project.

First Solar has tangled with these green groups before. The 550-MW Topaz solar project that it recently finished developing 30 miles south in San Luis Obipso County faced similar objections, and didn’t move ahead until the company and Defenders of Wildlife, Center for Biological Diversity and the Sierra Club reached an agreement to boost conservation acreage, among other measures.

Apple’s motivations with the deal – the largest commercial end-user solar purchase ever, First Solar said – are manifold: It’s trying to latch onto as much renewable energy as possible because it’s the “right thing to do,” CEO Tim Cook said at a Goldman Sachs technology conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, according to various reports. Might be good PR, as well – and solar, aided in no small part by a 30 percent Investment Tax Credit against the construction cost, makes financial sense. (That ITC falls to 10 percent in 2017, but First Solar says the plant will be built by then.)

“We expect to have a very significant savings because we have a fixed price for the renewable energy, and there’s quite a difference between that price and the price of brown energy,” Cook said.

First Solar has a 15-year deal to sell the other 150-megawatts of California Flats power to the utility Pacific Gas & Electric. According to documents filed with the state, that portion of the plant will deliver an average of 381 gigawatt-hours per year to PG&E.

Such details on Apple’s deal weren’t available, but presumably its 130-MW portion will be similarly efficient, which would translate to 330 GWh per year. Without factoring in some panel decline beyond year 15, that suggests about 8,250 GWh of electricity over the life of the contract. By simple, crude division, at $848 million, that would price out to $102 per megawatt-hour, or around 10 cents a kilowatt-hour. The average price of electricity for commercial customers in California in November 2014 was 15.45 cents/kWh, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. What it might be in 10, 15 or 20 years is anyone’s guess.