California’s massive buildout of solar panels over the past decade has delivered vast amounts of clean energy to state residents, but with a big catch. When the sun sets, utilities have to either turn to nonrenewable energy sources or the relatively little solar power that gets stored in the state’s batteries. But this month, California’s battery problem saw a major breakthrough.

On June 11, the California Energy Commission officially approved the Darden Clean Energy Project, a sprawling solar farm and battery storage facility proposed for a stretch of fallow farmland in western Fresno County. Darden is the first project approved under a new fast-track permitting program, which gave the commission just 270 days to finish its environmental review; Gov. Gavin Newsom lauded the news in a news release, writing that the state is “moving faster than ever before” to build up clean energy. 

The land for the project, near Cantua Creek, was once a productive site for agriculture. But droughts and decades of farming have left the 9,500-acre area with dry and alkaline soil. The Westlands Water District currently owns the land and is shutting down irrigation on it and other swaths of former farmland, aiming to conserve water for areas with better dirt.

This land’s status — defunct for agriculture but not wild — made it a prime target for San Francisco-based Intersect Power, which pitched and would build Darden. Marisa Mitchell, the company’s head of environmental and permitting, said at the California Energy Commission’s June 11 meeting that the area “lit up like a light as the ideal place in the state to site large-scale solar,” due to negligible effects on wildlife and agricultural production. 

She also pitched her company’s work as a breath of new life for the San Joaquin Valley, noting that Intersect plans to build a PG&E interconnection point that will ideally encourage more clean energy projects in the area and give those projects a way to transmit their power. Intersect plans to begin construction late this year and finish by late 2027 or 2028, the company’s head of community engagement, Elizabeth Knowles, told SFGATE. Knowles added that the build-out will generate 1,200 jobs.

Kerman Mayor Maria Pacheco and Mendota Mayor Victor Martinez, whose towns are both near the proposed facility, spoke up at the commission’s meeting as well in support of the project. The area’s Democratic state lawmakers, Sen. Anna Caballero and Assemblymember Esmeralda Soria, both lauded the project as a boost to California’s clean energy ambitions in statements to SFGATE, but said that it also needs to provide real and lasting benefits to the rural area. Soria wrote that Darden’s planners should hire and source materials locally. Caballero noted that the same droughts that left this land fallow have displaced farmworkers from nearby communities.

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