Published: Sunday, August 26, 2012 at 2:54 p.m.
Last Modified: Sunday, August 26, 2012 at 2:54 p.m.
Cloverdale, one of Sonoma County’s perennial hot spots, is poised to harvest some of that plentiful sunshine.
A solar development company last week applied to install a three-megawatt photovoltaic system in the hills west of town, in what could be the largest solar array to date in Sonoma County.
The project is proposed on 20 acres off Kelly Road on an old wood waste dump, considered undesirable for farming or vineyards.
“This wouldn’t even make good pasture land,” said Craig Furber, whose family owns the property. “This is a wonderful use for it.”
The $12 million project is being proposed by Cenergy Power, a Modesto- and Carlsbad-based company that specializes in solar installations for agricultural uses, including pistachio, almond and fig processing facilities.
The company, a division of BAP Power Corp., is planning to lease the land from the Furber family to generate the electricity and sell it to PG&E, by tying into its nearby transmission lines.
The amount of sunshine in Cloverdale “is not as good as Phoenix, Arizona. But it’s still pretty good production, especially in summer,” said Craig Chahbazi, Cenergy director of business development.
The company said the project has the potential to be a blueprint for temporary, distributed power PV systems on less productive lands in Sonoma County and other parts of Northern California.
The Cloverdale project would be dwarfed by huge solar arrays encompassing hundreds of acres in the Southern California and parts of the central valley.
But in Sonoma County it might be the largest so far.
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