Photovoltaic plant to be built in Tecate, Baja California, Mexico

The photovoltaic plant in Tecate, BC, will be built by the company Sempra Energy.
Sempra Energy, through its holding company Energía Sierra Juárez – which manages the energy generating companies in La Rumorosa – will build a new photovoltaic plant in the municipality of Tecate that will have a battery storage system with a connection to the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) system.

On October 14, the company presented the project to the General Directorate of Environmental Impact and Risk (DGIRA) for evaluation, with the name “Rumorosa Solar II Project”, which will be larger than the existing plant.
The Environmental Impact Statement was presented as an “expansion of the Rumorosa Solar park, through the construction, assembly, operation and maintenance of a photovoltaic plant with a generation capacity at the interconnection point of 59 MW and up to 72 MW of peak power in alternating current.”

The project includes a booster substation, a battery energy storage system, and a single-circuit structure that will be connected to the existing transmission line of the Rumorosa Solar project (currently in operation) to achieve evacuation to the electrical substation called Rumorosa, owned by the Federal Electricity Commission.”

For the development of the project, a surface area of ??155 hectares will be available, located at kilometer 42 of the Mexicali-Tijuana federal highway, in Tecate. In that area it will be necessary to remove “microphilous desert scrub.”
The Rumorosa Solar photovoltaic plant, which is already in operation, was inaugurated in November 2019 and has an installed capacity of 41 Mega Watts, Alternating Current (MW AC) – a megawatt (MW) is a unit of power equivalent to one million watts – and it was said at the time that this amount of energy was equivalent to generating clean energy for 70 thousand homes in California, to which Sempra sells the energy.

In addition to this new plant, which will be larger than the existing one, Sempra Infrastructure will place 64 more wind turbines in La Rumorosa, as part of the Cimarrón project, the third phase of the Energía Sierra Juárez wind complex, which also produces energy for sale to the state of California. (All new projects are presented as expansions.)
The energy giant announced last week the arrival at the port of Ensenada of the first vessels with wind components, from where they began to be transported to La Rumorosa, to produce 319 MW with its gigantic blades that move with the force of the wind.

Sempra’s wind and solar parks can be seen when traveling along the Tijuana-Mexicali highway, and although so far all the energy that the company produces in Baja California is exported to the United States, the new photovoltaic plant project – only registered in the list of MIAs that entered the federal government’s evaluation, the declaration is not yet public – says that there will be a connection with the Mexican energy generator, CFE.