Potential “Green” Power Plants in Southwest Not Without Controversy

A few weeks ago we reported on a eco-friendly power plant seeking a home here in RV country. As we discussed, a company called EnviroMission approached the Quartzsite Town Council looking for support for their planned solar power plant to be built north of town. The EnviroMission plant would use heated air to turn electrical generating turbines in a towering stack, generating more than just electricity–jobs, too. Apparently the desert sun doesn’t just attract snowbirds, but companies with big ideas.

Up north in Mohave County, the big “green” power guys are trying to get a foothold as well. Mohave Sun Power wants to build a big project, Hualapai Valley Solar, just north of Kingman. Their project, too, uses heat from the sun to spin out electricity–but it has a different twist: Instead of the heat from the sun simply spinning a turbine, their project requires that precious desert resource to function: Water.

‘If you aren’t from around here, stranger, you may not know we hang people for letting their faucet drip,’ may be the phrase to remember. How much water would the Hualapai Valley project require? 1,500 to 3,000 acre feet a year. Let’s see if we can translate that into a more recognizable quantity. The good folks at Wikipedia tell us an acre foot, “is defined by the volume of one acre of surface area to a depth of one foot. Since the area of one acre is defined as 66 by 660 feet (a chain by a furlong) then the volume of an acre-foot is exactly 43560 cubic feet. Alternatively, this is approximately 325,851.4 U.S. gallons or 271,328.0 imperial gallons or 1,233.5 kL (or m³).”

So we multiply 325,851.4 gallons times a minimum of 1,500 (acre feet) and hey, presto! The proposed Mohave county plant would eat up a mere 489 million gallons, give or take. From the perspective of a desert dweller, that’s close enough to 500 million gallons, which is a whole lot of water.

Jobs and tax dollars not withstanding, that kind of water going up in vapor is a thought not lost on local politicians. Some amount of resistance is being shown toward the prospective developers of the big project, which would crank out 340 megawatts of juice. But Mohave County officials aren’t impressed. They say that all that power would do little to help Arizona–most of it would be sold to states like California. ‘All our water to send power to California?’ seems to be a rallying cry.

An alternative the company is investigating to make the idea more palatable is to utilize treated sewage effluent instead of fresh water. So if a turbine is nothing more than a large fan, with all these things in mind, you may already realize why something’s hitting the fan next door in Mohave County.

photo courtesy Kingman Daily Miner