It’s back. The Palen solar project, which was to be built on public land between Interstate 10 and Joshua Tree National Park about 10 miles east of Desert Center, is rearing its ugly head again. The Bureau of Land Management will hold a meeting at 3:30 p.m. at City Hall in Palm Springs Wednesday to take public comments on the latest resurrection. The project’s new developer, San Diego-based EDF Renewable Energy, wants to build a 500-megawatt, 4,200-acre field of solar panels, rather than the 750-foot towers proposed by the project’s previous owner. Environmentalists say it would disrupt habitat critical to Mojave fringe-toed lizards, as well as the threatened Agassiz’s desert tortoise. The solar project has been abandoned three times. The project’s original developer won approval from the California Energy Commission in 2010 but subsequently went bankrupt. BrightSource Energy and Abengoa Solar later swooped in, proposing to build two “power towers” that would have used a field of mirrors to focus sunlight on boilers at the tops of the towers; that plan fell through. BrightSource backed out and Abengoa filed for bankruptcy. Abengoa sold Palen to EDF, which is starting from scratch and has now applied for a new license from the BLM and Riverside County.
