As eSolar gains more stride, the company’s CEO Bill Gross said in an interview with Yale Environment 360 that it is unnecessary to build solar projects on untouched land.
Gross said that eSolar’s commitment was to “never impact pristine land” and the company follows that by having a higher output per acre taking a smaller footprint. In addition, eSolar is more cost efficient as projects are smaller. “We can be fully economical at our 46 MW size,” he said.
He added, “So rather than needing 2,000 acres contiguous to make the economics work — which you almost only can find far away on pristine land or [federal] land — we can locate on only 200 acres very close to a city and we can buy previously disturbed farmland or other properties that’s already been developed so we’re not causing any disturbance to natural habitat.”
It also takes years to build transmission lines out to these untouched areas.
“I think you can build enough solar thermal without going into the pristine desert. There’s enough private land close to population centers, and it’s not that much a percentage of the cost of a project. That land is not the expensive thing. The solar field and the power plant dwarfs the cost of the land. There’s no reason why you can’t locate on disturbed land and not have to deal with affecting wildlife habitat,” he concluded.
From this, it would appear as though eSolar will be one of the companies that will not take part in the Desertec Initiative, which is set to install solar projects throughout the Sahara desert transporting the energy to generate power in Europe.
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