‘Save Our Mesa’ Gains Following

By NICK YAMASHITA

The Progress

Two residents of Moapa Valley have begun a social media battle to stop a proposal to build huge solar generating plant on the Mormon Mesa directly east of Moapa Valley. Their efforts have quickly hit a chord in the state.

A Facebook page entitled ‘Moapa Valley Save Our Mesa’ was created by local residents Kat Lounsbury and Lisa Childs.
“We found out about this solar project going on our Mesa recently from the article published in The Progress,” said Lounsbury. “The more we did research into it, the more we are against it.”

The project is being called the Battle Born Solar Project. It is proposed by California-based Arevia Power. A Public Utilities Commission of Nevada document filed on April 13, calls for “approval to construct an up to 850 megawatt photovoltaic solar energy generating facility, including a 850 megawatt energy storage system.”

“The proposed site for this project is literally on top of Mormon Mesa and on top of us, residents of Moapa Valley,” Lounsbury said.
It encompasses 9,200 acres (14 square miles) of land that is managed by the BLM.

Lounsbury said that the nearby communities are completely overlooked in the filing materials. “The proposal map that was submitted literally has nothing where all the Overton and Logandale residences are,” she said. “It just says in small letters ‘Moapa’. It is as if they were saying we don’t exist!”

Lounsbury went on about the research that the two have done together. “We have become engrossed with thousands of pages of reading,” she said. “We have gone over everything we can find about the solar project. We created the (Facebook) page and within one day we had a couple of hundred members.”
The current membership of the page is 1,006.

Lounsbury said that this is not the first time that a company has tried to propose a solar energy facility in this location. It has been proposed two times before starting back in 2008. At that time it was being guided by then-Senator Harry Reid and was being funded by Goldman-Sachs and Bright Source Energy.

The current solar proposal is being funded by Solar Partner VII which is a subsidiary of the company Arevia.

Other companies which have been involved were also subsidiaries of Arevia. However the address on the filings were for a residential address in Napa, California which is owned by the Graf Family Trust according to public records. Ricardo Graf is the Chief Development Officer and Managing Partner of Arevia Power.

On February 6, 2020, Governor Sisolak sent a letter to Trump Administration officials to show support of the Battle Born Solar Project as a “covered project under the FAST-41”. Sisolak states in this letter the “project will bring over 1,250 jobs and more than $350 million in value to the Southern Nevada economy.”

Both Hayes and Lounsbury said that their research showed something quite different.
“No studies have been released, and there is nothing out there that makes those claims,” said Lounsbury.

“By other previous similar solar projects, we have seen that probably an average of 7-8 full time positions will be employed to manage the facility here. They may hire part-time and bring in their own employees to help do repairs and such, but overall the statistics of a huge supply of open jobs is not likely.”

One of the biggest concerns for the two women is that access to historical sites could be destroyed and recreational access could be closed off by this mammoth project.

“We have the only remaining original part of the Old Spanish Trail up there and the famous land art of Double Negative is there,” Lounsbury said. “That area is also the entry point to the community tradition of the ‘M’. All of that could be closed off and possibly destroyed.”

Childs said that they started this social media page to draw attention to the project and give facts and information about it and the importance of the Mormon Mesa site to the community.

“Residents need to realize the huge change this would make to our community and the damage it could do to us here,” Lounsbury said. “We have nothing against solar energy, but it should be located where no one is around and where there isn’t so much history and traditional use of the land linked to the location.”

“Everyone local and nearby who use the Mormon Mesa is invited to request to be part of this Facebook page,” Childs said. “Come and be informed, so we can stop it.”