Special Report: How the Rise of a Mega Solar Panel Farm Shows Us the Future of Energy
After close to four years of ongoing construction, plus three years of planning and permitting, the $2.4 billion, 550-megawatt Topaz Solar Farm — the first of this size in operation — is finally finished, and primed to sell power to California utility PG&E. The project is owned and operated by MidAmerican Energy, a subsidiary of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.
While Topaz is the first of its kind at this massive scale, it’s actually the first of a series of similarly large solar panel farms that are being built in various locations across California (as well as Nevada and Arizona, too), enabling these states to meet their aggressive clean power mandates and tapping into the powerful sun of the Southwest. And Topaz is interesting not just because it’s the first of these mega solar farms out of the gate in California, but also because the project’s history provides an in-depth glimpse into the evolution of the solar industry, and energy innovation, over the last decade.