Residents win access to details of proposed solar facility

Mar. 29—A group of Santa Fe-area residents expects to spend upcoming weeks combing over new details about a solar energy project proposed south of the city.

Through a court ruling Thursday, the group — a recently formed, all-volunteer nonprofit called the Clean Energy Coalition for Santa Fe County — secured public access to information previously described as trade secrets by leaders of the global energy company AES Corp.

AES filed the First Judicial District Court case in September, seeking redactions to documents Santa Fe County was poised to release to a resident in response to an open records request.

At the time, AES Director of Innovation Engineering Mike Simpson wrote in an affidavit the company would "suffer economic harm" from release of "information that is clearly trade secrets." The information included the characteristics and chemical composition of batteries AES could use in its Rancho Viejo Solar project, Simpson wrote.

However, attorneys for the company moved to dismiss the case during its discovery phase.

"After further evaluation, AES determined that at this time any potential harm [from disclosure] would be outweighed by furthering the transparency of the project's safety features and testing protocols," Joshua Mayer, lead developer for the Rancho Viejo Solar project, wrote in an email.

The Clean Energy Coalition had entered the case to contest the notion that redactions constituted trade secrets after attorneys for Santa Fe County said they would take a neutral stance on the issue.

The county's position "just kind of left us scratching our heads," coalition board President Lee Zlotoff said in an interview.

Zlotoff wrote in a news release the full disclosure of records on the solar project will be "a big win for transparency and any county resident concerned about the risks and impact of the massive industrial-scale battery facility the company wants to construct in a residential area."

The coalition will use the records "to ascertain with precision the consequences we all face," board Vice President Randy Coleman wrote in a news release.

Some members of the coalition, including Coleman, are engineers. The group will find its own expert consultants if needed, Zlotoff said.

The 96-megawatt solar array and 48-megawatt battery facility, as described in the company's January 2023 conditional use permit application, would be built on 800 acres of private land east of N.M. 14, about one mile south of Santa Fe city limits.

The battery energy storage portion of the project would be "approximately 1.5 miles or more" from the nearest homes, Mayer wrote.

The project has sparked fierce opposition from some residents of Rancho San Marcos, Eldorado and Rancho Viejo, primarily over concerns about the risk of a thermal runaway fire caused by lithium-ion batteries. Thermal runaway is a process by which lithium-ion cells heat up uncontrollably, sometimes causing a fire or explosion.

Lithium-ion battery energy storage systems around the globe have "an alarming record of fires," including incidents at smaller AES facilities in Arizona in 2019 and 2022, the Coalition for Clean Energy wrote in the news release.

"As currently proposed," Mayer wrote, the project would have approximately 575,000 battery cells contained within 38 "fire-rated and insulated" containers "designed to prevent enclosure-to-enclosure spread." Direct injection of fire suppressant can stop thermal runaway, he wrote.

Battery energy storage system technology has rapidly advanced even in the past few years and has a strong safety record overall, Mayer wrote, adding the project would adhere to local, national and international fire codes.

The company's conditional use permit application remains under review by Santa Fe County.

The county hired Albuquerque-based Terracon Consultants Inc. to review AES' application last spring and aims to hire another consultant to review the project's battery energy storage component.

The county "did not receive any responses to an initial procurement" for consulting services but has begun a second attempt, with responses due April 8, spokeswoman Olivia Romo wrote in an email. If no consultants respond to the second procurement, the county "may negotiate in the open market for the services," she added.

Following the county's reviews, AES would submit an updated application responding to consultants' comments before the project would go before a hearing officer and the county Planning Commission for potential approval.