FIRST PHASE OF MEXICAN SOLAR PROJECT TO BE OPERATING IN APRIL

By CHRISTOPHER SHERMAN

Associated Press

PUERTO PEÑASCO, Mexico

(AP) — Mexico was pushed to accelerate its turn toward renewable energy after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year drove a sharp increase in global energy costs, Mexico Foreign Affairs Secretary Marcelo Ebrard said late Thursday.

Ebrard made the comments after taking dozens of foreign diplomats to see a massive new solar energy project near the U.S. border.

“Mexico is making a really great effort because it didn’t consider (the shift to renewable energy and electric vehicles) would be so fast,” Ebrard said. The decisions made by the United States and Mexico in the past year to invest heavily in those areas “didn’t appear so near before the war.”

“We too have to change the focus,” he said. “It has to go faster.”

In April, Mexico plans to power up the first phase of a huge solar energy project near a beach town popular with tourists making the short drive from the United States.

Once completed, the full $1.6 billion project will have a generating capacity of 1,000 megawatts — enough to power some 500,000 homes. It will be the largest solar project built by Mexico’s state-owned electric company. In Puerto Peñasco, near the top of the Gulf of California and border with Arizona, rows of solar panels that tilt with the passing sun run off to the horizon hovering above the sand. The project will eventually cover 5,000 acres in the transition where the desert flattens between the rugged brown mountains and blue sea.

The Federal Electric Commission plans to have the first 120 megawatts of the project operational by April 29, Juan Antonio Fernández, the commission’s strategic planning director, said Thursday. Sonora Gov. Alfonso Durazo, who once served as a Cabinet minister alongside Ebrard before running for state office, made the case that Sonora should be the centre of

Mexico’s electric vehicle production. In addition to the solar energy coming online — in total 5 gigawatts of solar capacity are planned for the state — Sonora has the country’s largest known deposits of lithium, a key component in batteries for electric vehicles.

Ebrard said the plan represented a “new model of development.”

“We’re not going to be able to do that in all of the states at the same time,” he said. “But we have to demonstrate that that idea can be real and is not wishful thinking.”

The turn toward renewable energy is at odds with other priorities of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

The president has invested heavily in propping up the long-struggling state-owned oil company.

He is building a big new oil refinery.

And he has pushed legislation that gives advantages to the state-owned electric company over private energy production, which in many cases was cleaner. It is the subject of a trade dispute with the United States and Canada.

Ebrard is one of several people seeking the presidential nomination of López Obrador’s Morena party for the 2024 national elections.

(AP) — Virginia’s biggest undergraduate university reached a milestone Tuesday in its effort to establish a tech-focused graduate campus in northern Virginia. Virginia Tech officials raised a steel beam to the 11th floor of a 300,000-square-foot (30,000-square-metre) building in Alexandria that will anchor the school’s new Innovation Campus. The campus is part of a major redevelopment of the northern Virginia corridor around Reagan National Airport that will feature Amazon’s new headquarters complex on the northern end and Tech’s new graduate campus on the south. Plans for the campus were announced back in 2018 to coincide with Amazon’s selection of northern Virginia for its second headquarters, dubbed HQ2. Indeed, Amazon cited the Innovation Campus as a major reason it chose to locate in northern Virginia.

At ceremonies commemorating the topping out of construction Tuesday, Innovation Campus Executive Director Lance Collins called it a “symbolic midpoint of the project.”

The university expects the building to open in time for the fall semester in 2024. Eventually, three buildings totaling 600,000 square feet (55,000 square metres) are expected to be completed by 2030 at a cost of more than $1 billion. The campus will serve more than 750 graduate students, mostly in computer science and engineering programmes.