Canadian renewables company Revolve Renewable Power has received approval to build a 250MW solar-and-storage project on land managed by the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in Arizona.
Located in La Paz County, the Parker Project will now conduct an environmental impact assessment (EIA) as well as interconnection study for the site. Interconnection queues in the US, however, are at record lengths, with many developers shelving or cancelling projects when faced with several year waits and high grid upgrade costs.
The company has contracted Wood Group, a global engineering consultancy firm with experience across the energy sector in the US, to lead the field studies required as part of the National Environmental Policy Act process.
“Completion of the variance approval process is a major milestone for the development of the Parker Project and is the result of some excellent work by the Revolve development team working closely with the BLM over the last 10 months,” said Steve Dalton, CEO of Revolve.
At the end of 2021, the BLM started solicitating interest for utility-scale solar projects on nearly 90,000 acres of public land located across Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico.
At the time, it had said it had allocated roughly 870,000 acres of federal public land as environmentally preferrable for solar leasing based on the areas’ high potential for solar energy and suitability for utility-scale solar plants.
Just last month, it issued final approval for the construction of a 500MW solar project in the desert of south-eastern California.