US DOE picks Hecate to negotiate 1-GW solar project at nuclear site

The US Department of Energy (DOE) recently announced it will start realty negotiations with US renewables developer Hecate Energy LLC for a solar project of up to 1 GW at a DOE-owned land in Washington State.

The negotiations concern an 8,000-acre area at the Hanford Site, a large nuclear site that produced plutonium for US defense, including for atomic bombs in World War II.

DOE is making the acreage available for a gigawatt-scale solar system with battery storage as part of the Cleanup to Clean Energy initiative, which seeks to repurpose parts of DOE-owned lands, parts of which were previously used in the US nuclear weapons programme.

The selection of Hecate Energy LLC to be given the opportunity to negotiate a realty agreement follows a competitive qualifications-based process.

“Since the beginning of the Biden-Harris Administration, we’ve added nearly 90 GW of solar capacity to the grid—enough to power roughly 13 million homes—and we're building on this historic progress with another massive solar project," remarked US Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm.

Meanwhile, last week, Hecate also approached the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) with a request to acquire commercial wind energy leases on the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) in the Gulf of Mexico.

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