Blythe will soon become home to a 485-megawatt photovoltaic solar facility. The desert town of 20,000 people sits just west of the Colorado River in California, across from the Arizona border.
The large-scale solar farm will sit on roughly 5 square miles of private land and supply energy to an estimated 145,000 homes in southern California.
The Renewable Resources Group, an asset management firm, will oversee the building process.
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) approved the project, because the transmission lines will cut across public lands. The solar farm is one of the largest renewable energy projects approved by BLM, said Janice Schneider, assistant secretary.
This new solar farm is part of the Obama administration's push for renewable energy. President Barack Obama spoke about the importance of solar at the National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas on Aug. 24.
“In fact, over the past six years, the federal government has approved 34 commercial-scale solar projects, and the transmission infrastructure that goes with them, on public lands across the West," said President Obama. "We approved one new project just today in California that will ultimately power another 100,000 plus homes.”
The federal government expects utility-scale solar capacity to increase by almost 100 percent, or 10 gigawatts, between 2014 and 2016, and estimates roughly 40 percent of this new capacity will be built in California.