The Santa Fe County Planning Commission is scheduled to make a decision on Monday about a project that could transform local efforts to increase renewable energy generation.
Virginia-based AES Clean Energy will defend its plan to construct a 96 megawatt capacity solar power plant with 48 megawatts of lithium battery energy storage on nearly 700 acres of privately owned land near Highway 14.
“ Doing a larger project like this is sized to largely provide the equivalent amount of power of the entire residential demand of Santa Fe in one project," Joshua Mayer said.
"If we get one approval, if we get one contract signed, we are making a huge stride forward in sustainably powering this city.”
That’s Joshua Mayer, senior development manager for the clean energy business within the Virginia-based AES Corporation, one of the largest power companies in the world.
For the past two years he’s been leading the charge for AES to build the Rancho Viejo Solar project.
Mayer often cites New Mexico’s Energy Transition Act when making his case.
The ETA, passed in 2019, requires that the state’s utilities rely 100% on zero carbon resources by 2045.
At least two groups of community members strongly oppose the AES plan, mainly due to what they say is the potential for fire.
Rancho Viejo Solar would be powered by more than 200,000 solar panels and 570,000 lithium-ion batteries.
Founder of the Clean Energy Coalition for Santa Fe County, Lee Zlotoff, states that one reason for his group’s opposition is a proposed design that hasn’t yet been tested in an active project.
"When asked under oath, 'What you are proposing to put here in Santa Fe . . . has this ever been—this configuration of elements—ever been done anywhere else?" Zlotoff said.
"And they said, 'Well, all the components have been used in other places, but they've never been used in this configuration before.
"'So with all due respect,' I said, 'Why should we be your guinea pigs?' This is clearly a technology that is not mature.”
Mayer’s response was that laboratory testing on the project’s multi-level fire-prevention system does mimic real world circumstances and reduces the chance of a runaway fire to nearly zero.
AES and CEC, along with the San Marcos residential association, last squared off in an early December land use hearing that lasted about eight hours and featured an afternoon of heated comments and questions from community members about the project.
Santa Fe County officials had previously recommended approval of a conditional use permit based on the AES application, subject to the company satisfying a long list of conditions.
But on Dec. 23, the officer contracted to oversee the land use hearing recommended that the application be denied.
In the analysis section of her order, hearing officer Marilyn Hebert wrote that AES had failed to satisfy three of the criteria required by the permit application:
- That it not be “detrimental to… the general welfare of the area”;
- That it won’t “create a potential hazard for fire, panic, or other danger”;
- And that it would adhere to requirements of zoning as well as the county’s land use code and sustainable growth management plan.
Mayer said he was taken aback by Hebert’s denial and plans to rebut her statements at Monday’s planning meeting.
”We were surprised and we do respectfully disagree with the conclusion.
We look forward to the planning commission on February 3, because we'll actually go kind of one by one on some of the reasons that she cited."
Hebert wrote in her order that the project could be quote “catastrophic” because its site boundaries are only about 550 feet from the Rancho San Marcos subdivision and 4,000 feet from El Dorado.
Noting that the community’s concern chiefly relates to fear of battery fires, Mayer said the project’s battery installations would be no closer than a mile and a half from the nearest residence.
“ There's a lot of flooding the zone with misinformation and we find that it's unfortunate that there's a lot of folks who are potentially feeling real fear about a project that we have proven in a laboratory is safe,” Mayer said.
Zlotoff, who said his CEC community group is very much in favor of renewable energy, cited a number of other concerns, including what he said were AES’s plans for deriving utility profits from its potential arrangement with PNM, insufficient equipment available to county firefighters, and the possibility of higher rates in fire insurance coverage.
Those claims are published on the CEC website.
In a document AES provided to KSFR, Mayer denied all of CEC’s accusations with detailed rebuttals that he summed up on a range from “outright false” to misleading.
Community concerns were ratcheted up in recent weeks after the mid-January Moss Landing Fire in California, both because it is a solar power plant that stores energy in lithium batteries, and because there is a connection to AES.
Fluence Energy, which bills itself as “A Siemens and AES Company,” served as engineering contractor on an early phase of the Moss Landing project, according to Business Insider.
In an interview about one week after the fire broke out, Zlotoff said he believes it’s an important example of the hazards his group anticipates.
“ I think it's become a sort of galvanizing point for what we have been trying to educate the public about in terms of, these facilities are dangerous," said Zlotoff.
"And I read in the newspaper that AES went to a lot of trouble to distance themselves from this project.”
Mayer said he couldn’t speak in much detail about the incident, since AES doesn’t own or operate the Moss Landing project.
He did say the proposed Rancho Viejo project design adheres to the latest updated safety code standards, whereas the older Moss Landing project did not.
The Santa Fe County Planning Commission will hear from both sides in the meeting at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center on Monday, February 3, 2025, at 1:30 p.m.
