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The Tulare County Board of Supervisors took an action at its meeting last Tuesday that continued to clear the path — literally — for the nation's largest solar farm.

The Rexford Solar Farm is being developed in different areas in the Terra Bella area and between Ducor and Richgrove. The entire project will include 3,600 acres. It's hoped the project will be operational in 2023.

The board approved the abandonment of two right of way areas that won't be used for roads in the Ducor and Richgrove areas. The board approved the abandonments after public hearings were held on both matters.

The abandonment south of Ducor includes Avenue 52 between Road 240 and Road 246, Road 242 between Avenue 48 and Avenue 56 and Road 244 between Avenue 48 and Avenue 56. The abandonment in the Richgrove area includes Avenue 20 between Road 224 and Highway 65.

The Rexford Solar Farm will generate 700 megawatts of power. On Kent Hopper's Hopper in the Morning podcast on Monday morning, Tulare County Supervisor Dennis Townsend said the farm will generate enough power for all of Tulare County “and a little more than that.”

Townsend added the solar farm will effectively enable Tulare County to produce more energy than it uses. “We will be a net exporter of energy for Tulare County on just this one project,” he said.

The company developing the project, 8Minute Solar Energy, has also stated the farm will offset enough CO2 annually that's the equivalent of planting 12,000 trees every day for 10 years.

The road abandonments approved by the supervisors covers a portion of the project that will be located in the foothills. Another benefit of the project, Townsend said, concerns the Sustainable Ground Management Act, which places limits on the pumping of groundwater.

Because of those requirements there will be farmland that will have to be plowed under or fallowed. Townsend said the foothill area involved in the road abandonments didn't have that much value as far as agriculture is concerned. “Very little of it has actually been used for ag land,” Townsend said.

The state has been looking at ways to prevent fallowed ag land from becoming a nuisance that become dust bowls that hurt the environment, including providing grants to farmers to provide their fallowed land to be used for other purposes. And turning fallowed farmland into solar farms is also obviously another alternative.

“The timing of it is pretty good,” said Townsend about the Rexford Solar Farm. He added the portion of land where the approved road abandonments is located is an area that will “probably get fallowed.”

8Minute Solar Energy said more than 1,000 construction jobs is being created by the project and most of those jobs are being filled locally.

The company also stated the project will contribute more than $200 million to Tulare County's economy. The project will cover a length of 13 miles.

The Solar Farm is also expected to help deal with and prevent blackouts which could happen when energy usage is high during extremely hot days in the summer.

On the Hopper in the Morning podcast Townsend also talked about another project to deal with that issue. Southern California Edison is adding 535 megawatts of battery energy storage to three of its substations, one of them being the Springville substation located near Success Lake.

The total cost of the three projects is $1.22 billion with the cost of the Springville substation project alone being $500 million.

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