A draft solicitation for a carbon-free power project at the Hanford Site in Washington state could be released within a month, a senior adviser with the Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup office said during an online presentation Tuesday.
Hanford was the first DOE Office of Environmental Management property to hold a “Cleanup to Clean Energy” information day, and the agency is working on a draft request for proposals (RFP) based upon the comments, DOE’s Candice Robertson said Tuesday.
Robertson spoke during an Energy Communities Alliance (ECA) presentation on energy development on federal land. During the Oct. 31 presentation, Robertson said the draft RFP could be out “next month” which would seemingly translate into late November or early December. A DOE nuclear energy official said last week the agency would like to see its first clean energy award within a year.
Requests for information have also been issued for the Idaho National Laboratory site as well as the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, Robertson said. While DOE thinks the tracts at Savannah River might be well-suited for solar energy, “we are waiting to see what industry thinks,” she added. An information day on land available at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico can be expected early in 2024, Robertson added.
The other two speakers were Peter Flynn, a co-founder of Bostonia Partners, which has helped line up financing for billions of dollars of power projects, as well as Seth Kirshenberg, ECA’s executive director.
The ECA is excited to see the clean energy projects going forward although DOE has not decided what it is going to do in terms of what legal authorities it will use, Kirshenberg said.
As an attorney, Kirshenberg said he has worked on many electric power projects on Department of Defense land. Leasing under the Atomic Energy Act might be a logical route for DOE to go, he said. When it comes to power purchase agreements, the government is typically limited to only 10-year agreements unless the federally-owned Tennessee Valley Authority or Western Area Power Administration are involved, he said.
“This is not a short process,” Kirshenberg said. There are a multitude of administrative issues —ranging from the structure of any leases or power purchase agreements — to successful completion of National Environmental Policy Act and National Historic Preservation Act reviews, Kirshenberg said.
“Reality requires financing for these projects to occur,” Flynn said. Financiers of power projects value transparency, standardization and scale, he said. The investors like projects that are not too exotic and can probably be put together on time and within budget.
“New and untested technologies are often difficult to finance,” and such financing can be expensive, Flynn said. In addition, these are “turbulent times” for capital markets and interest rates could loom large, he said.
Financiers of solar developments typically want either long-term power purchase agreements or access to renewable energy tax credits, Flynn said. “It’s important to have a fully-baked procurement, one that does not have to go back to the drawing board … it’s important not to have snafus along the way.”