Santa Fe's County Commission voted 4-1 on Tuesday to approve a permit that sets the stage for a massive solar energy farm near Eldorado.
However, if what opponents told SFR before is still true, the fight is far from over. The Clean Energy Coalition of Santa Fe County, which is a couple thousand people strong and growing, vowed to fight the Rancho Viejo Solar project to the end.
The County Commission's vote is only the end if either the CEC or another of the many opponents of the project don't file an official appeal. Commissioners only took up the matter because the CEC appealed a similar result when AES was granted a conditional use permit by the Planning Commission in December of last year. CEC President Lee Zlotoff told SFR in February that if County Commissioners voted the same way as the Planning Commission, "the matter will end up in District Court."
The only no vote cast Tuesday came from Commissioner Lisa Cacari Stone.
The project was first proposed in 2022 by Virginia-based AES, a global energy and utility generation company. If there is no appeal, AES would next partner with the Public Service Company of New Mexico to create one of New Mexico's biggest solar power plants and generate enough electricity to cover Santa Fe. Rancho Viejo Solar aims to produce 96 megawatts of power and roughly 45 megawatts of battery storage on 680 of an 800-acre piece of land just south of Santa Fe. Besides the solar panel farm, the project proposes a one-acre collector substation, a three-acre battery storage system and a two-mile generation line.
Tuesday's vote followed a nearly three full days of divided testimony. Though thousands of Santa Feans oppose the AES project, many of the dissenters approve of solar energy. The overriding concern is with the battery storage system generally used to support a solar project of this magnitude. Those systems, on eight occasions since 2019, have been at the root of thermal runaway events.
Proponents of the project point out that the technology supporting the proposed Rancho Viejo Solar project have advanced well beyond those incidents.The proposed project comes as solar projects are coming thick and fast to New Mexico, which aims to shift away from fossil fuels to clean energy over the next 20 years.
