The Rio Mesa Solar Electric Generating Facility was a proposed

solar thermal power Concentrated solar power (CSP, also known as concentrating solar power, concentrated solar thermal) systems generate solar power by using mirrors or lenses to concentrate a large area of sunlight into a receiver. Electricity is generated when ...

project in

Riverside County, California Riverside County is a County (United States), county located in the southern California, southern portion of the U.S. state of California. As of the 2020 United States Census, 2020 census, the population was 2,418,185, making it the fourth-most ...

. The developers for the project were subsidiaries of

BrightSource Energy BrightSource Energy, Inc. is an Oakland, California based, corporation that designs, builds, finances, and operates utility-scale solar power plants. Greentech Media ranked BrightSource as one of the top 10 greentech startups in the world in 2008 ...

, Inc. The plant was expected to cost about $2 billion. The plant was to comprise two

solar power tower A solar power tower, also known as 'central tower' power plant or 'heliostat' power plant, is a type of solar furnace using a tower to receive focused sunlight. It uses an array of flat, movable mirrors (called heliostats) to focus the sun's ra ...

s, each with a generating capacity of . About 170,000

heliostat A heliostat (from ''helios'', the Greek word for ''sun'', and ''stat'', as in stationary) is a device that includes a mirror, usually a plane mirror, which turns so as to keep reflecting sunlight toward a predetermined target, compensating ...

s would have reflected sunlight to the receivers mounted on top of the towers. The project was scaled down from to 500 MW in May 2012, for which it has a

power purchase agreement A power purchase agreement (PPA), or electricity power agreement, is a contract between two parties, one which generates electricity (the seller) and one which is looking to purchase electricity (the buyer). The PPA defines all of the commercial te ...

(PPA) with

Southern California Edison Southern California Edison (or SCE Corp), the largest subsidiary of Edison International, is the primary electricity supply company for much of Southern California. It provides 15 million people with electricity across a service territory of app ...

(SCE). In December 2011, the

California Energy Commission The California Energy Commission, formally the Energy Resources Conservation and Development Commission, is the primary energy policy and planning agency for California. Created in 1974 and headquartered in Sacramento, the Commission'core respon ...

(CEC) accepted the application for certification for the Rio Mesa SEGF. In October 2012, Rio Mesa received preliminary approval from the CEC; final approval was needed by June 2013 to fulfill its PPA. However, the discovery of a large deposit of

Pleistocene The Pleistocene ( , often referred to as the ''Ice age'') is the geological Epoch (geology), epoch that lasted from about 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago, spanning the Earth's most recent period of repeated glaciations. Before a change was fina ...

fossil A fossil (from Classical Latin , ) is any preserved remains, impression, or trace of any once-living thing from a past geological age. Examples include bones, shells, exoskeletons, stone imprints of animals or microbes, objects preserved ...

s underlying part of the project's area delayed approval or construction. In January 2013, BrightSource suspended the Rio Mesa project; the project was formally cancelled in July 2013.

References

External links

* * {{cite web , url= http://www.energy.ca.gov/sitingcases/riomesa/index.html , title= Rio Mesa Solar Electric Generating Facility Licensing Case , date= , year= , work= , publisher=

(CEC) , accessdate= October 5, 2012 Solar power stations in California Proposed solar power stations in the United States