INTERVIEW: Golden State Clean Energy COO details its San Joaquin Valley, California master plan

Golden State Clean Energy (GSCE) is working on a mammoth master plan that, at full build out, will include over 20,000 MW of capacity from solar and storage projects.

Patrick Mealoy, GSCE’s chief operating officer (COO), told NPM that this master plan aims to permit land, take care of land rights, and form project companies to interconnect them to a transmission system before auctioning off the prepped projects to renewable energy developers.

In October, GSCE closed a deal with Leyline Renewable Capital for USD 28m to support some of its projects that are mid- to- late stage development and where some are in PPA negotiations or term sheet.

Right now, GSCE’s pipeline consists of over 8,000 MW in different interconnection queues all throughout California. The full development pipeline, when adding in solar and storage, GSCE is pushing 4,500 MW to 50,000 MW of projects.

There is a heavy concentration of projects in California’s San Joaquin Valley, where GSCE’s legacy company first began developing the Westland Solar Park and where it is now pursuing its master plan, known as the Valley Clean Infrastructure Master Plan.

That plan will result in auctioning off individual companies complete with permitting, site control, and built-out transmission.

“When you look at the California grid and the amount of renewables that need to be added, even throughout the West, the highest concentration and probably the best from land use planning is to concentrate it where you can permit, where there is access to historic transmission corridors, which is why we are focused on that valley,” he said.

The Valley Clean Infrastructure Plan began with the 20,000-acre Westland Solar Park, a smaller-scale master plan predominately in Kings County with a gen-tie to Pacific Gas and Electric’s (PG&E) Gates Substation in Fresno County.

“This started almost 15 years ago and is about half built out, so about 10,000 acres built and about 1100 MW connected to the grid,” Mealoy said.

At full build-out, the master plan for Westlands Solar Park will be over 2700 MW.

The project is being done on what was historically agricultural land, with over 100-years of having been farmed. But, as a result of a drainage issue, the area was looking for a “higher and better use.”

Four years ago, around the time GSCE was formed, they approached the Westlands Water District about doing the Westland Solar Park, which is now becoming the Valley Clean Infrastructure Master Plan.

“The water district is a 614,00-acre district in Fresno and Kings counties, the largest federal water district in the US, so the state of Delaware as a comparable size,” Mealoy said.

GSCE entered an agreement with the district to build out the master plan, which is now about 130,000-acres under site control. That land is a little more than half public land, with the rest being private land.

“That size and scale supports a significant transmission build out,” he said.

The deal that was struck with the water district asks that GSCE drive transmission to the San Joaquin Valley so projects “aren’t just planned or thought about but are permitted” and “projects come online.”

He explained that this is essentially what is done in Texas, where transmission is built out to regions and once it is there, it isn’t hard for solar or wind to interconnect. Rather, it’s the timeframe and driving the transmission that is key.

Mealoy said that it just hasn’t been done in this order of magnitude.

“People have been chasing solar projects in the valley for 20+ years and 90% of those projects fail because of transmission because when you get an interconnection upgrade, it is so much,” Mealoy said. He pointed to the size of the master plan, which is enough to support 20,000 MW of solar and a comparable amount of storage. “When we hear that it could cost a couple billion dollars to upgrade the transmission system to interconnect that, if I’m developing a 500 MW or even 1000 MW, I can’t substantiate that amount of investment.”

But, he said, if that is spread across 20,000 MW of solar and storage, “it is now a reasonable and viable transmission investment.”

GSCE aims to interconnect the project companies, that it is working to form now, to a transmission system consisting of a grid that the district will own itself inside of its footprint.

“We will sell the project companies ultimately to another developer to build the projects,” Mealoy said. “We’re talking about projects that will be permitted, queued, and ready to file construction permits with Fresno County.”

GSCE has also preserved the right in its agreement that it can bid against other companies to be the ultimate developer for some of the projects, but Mealoy said that is not their goal or GSCE’s relationship with the district.

“When we sell these project companies, it will be done through a transparent third-party auction,” he said. “We’ve started communications with major developers to let them know what we are doing and that we are doing the front-end, high-risk development where most projects go to fail, and taking on that risk and our relationship with the district is to guarantee projects can get built and not just planned.”

When asked how many projects the master plan will support, Mealoy said that is still unclear. Right now, GSCE is in the midst of a programmatic EIR that was launched in February, which is their major focus, and that GSCE is doing the engineering design to make the project companies.

According to Mealoy, the project companies will range from 100 MW to 1000 MW. In comparison, the average project size in California ISO queue is 215 MW. He estimates that there will be about 40 to 70 individual project companies at the end of the day.

As for transmission, GSCE is looking at creating a backbone of a 500 kV system. One reason for this is the load pockets in California, where electrons flow to the greater Bay Area and LA Basin. GSCE’s objective is to create a collection system that steps up to 500 kV transmission system and puts it onto the existing California grid.

When looking at California’s grid, and in the wake of the CAISO queue reforms, Mealoy said that those reforms will go a long way to unclog the queue and goes with the white paper that GSCE published and advocated for, which argued that to enter interconnection queues there should be a minimum requirement for site control of at least six acres.

“In the original Cluster 15 to what there is now, two-thirds or 70% of projects have fallen out,” he said. “A significant portion were utility-scale solar where there was just not the land. There were a lot of developers clogging the queue with aspirations and leaving engineering work to be done by the ISO instead of bringing real projects.”

The master plan’s current schedule anticipates the administrative draft of the CEQA document in the next six months. There will be no sales of the property until there is a certified CEQA document, which could take anywhere from six to 18 months after it is published.

This means that the first auction of the project will likely be in 2026. Whether it will be 1Q26 or 3Q26 is outside GSCE’s control, he said.

The full build-out of the master plan, if all goes to schedule, will take roughly six years though Mealoy said that it could take longer.

According to NPM in July, GSCE obtained a preliminary agreement to deliver solar and storage capacity from its Valley Clean Infrastructure Plan project to California community choice aggregator (CCA) Marin Clean Energy (MCE). MCE anticipates the project could provide 200 MW to 400 MW of solar PV generation and four-to-eight-hour battery energy storage capacity.

*This story was originally published exclusively for NPM subscribers.

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