{"id":22842,"date":"2026-10-13T11:00:26","date_gmt":"2026-10-13T15:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/?p=22842"},"modified":"2026-10-13T06:17:24","modified_gmt":"2026-10-13T10:17:24","slug":"760000-solar-panels-route-66-mojave","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/760000-solar-panels-route-66-mojave\/","title":{"rendered":"More than 760,000 solar panels are going up across 2,000 acres of the Mojave Desert off old Route 66, with more than 300 battery containers beside them to keep the power flowing up to 16 hours a day, and a single carmaker has already signed up for about 90% of it"},"content":{"rendered":"

Solar panels stop making electricity when the sun goes down, and that\u2019s right about when a lot of people get home, switch on the TV and crank up the air conditioning.<\/p>\n

So the solar farm that\u2019s just started going up in Arizona\u2019s Mohave County is getting its own batteries. And I mean a lot of them. ContourGlobal, the London-based power producer building it, says Project Sterling will have more than 760,000 solar panels and more than 300 battery containers. Tesla\u2019s already signed up to buy about 90% of what it makes.<\/p>\n

Sterling\u2019s site is just off old Route 66, on the stretch that runs between Topock and Kingman, and a new 5.2-mile road called Polaris Road is going in to connect the two. Lake Havasu City, the Arizona town that famously bought London Bridge, is about 20 miles to the south, so a London company setting up shop out there feels about right.<\/p>\n

The whole project takes up more than 2,000 acres of the Mojave Desert. (Yes, the county spells it Mohave and the desert spells it Mojave. You get used to it.) For comparison, Sterling\u2019s more than 760,000 panels would top the 700,000 that we wrote about sitting on an old Soviet firing range in Germany<\/a>. Solar\u2019s turned up in odder spots around Arizona, like over an irrigation canal south of Phoenix<\/a>, but Sterling\u2019s the classic version, with a whole lot of panels spread across open desert.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
Solar panels<\/div>\n
760,000+<\/div>\n
Spread across more than 2,000 acres of the Mojave Desert in Mohave County, Arizona.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
Solar capacity<\/div>\n
509 MW<\/div>\n
What the panels are rated for in direct current. About 450 MW reaches the grid as alternating current.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
Battery storage<\/div>\n
1.4 GWh<\/div>\n
360 MW for about four hours, in more than 300 LFP battery containers.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
CONTRACTED<\/div>\n
Tesla\u2019s share<\/div>\n
~90%<\/div>\n
About 1 TWh a year of the more than 1.1 TWh Sterling should produce once it\u2019s running in 2028.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Figures: ContourGlobal.<\/p>\n

Tesla is buying about 1 terawatt-hour a year<\/h2>\n

Tesla\u2019s deal is a power purchase agreement, which ContourGlobal announced back in July<\/a>. A power purchase agreement is basically a long-term contract to buy a plant\u2019s electricity at a price agreed up front. It lets a company like Tesla line up a lot of clean power without having to build or run the plant itself.<\/p>\n

Under the deal, Tesla gets about 1 terawatt-hour a year, which ContourGlobal says is around 90% of what Sterling will produce. A terawatt-hour is a billion kilowatt-hours, and the kilowatt-hour is the unit on your power bill. Tesla also gets the renewable energy certificates that come with that power, which are basically the receipts that let a company count the electricity as clean.<\/p>\n

So where\u2019s all that power going?<\/p>\n

Sterling plugs into lines run by the Western Area Power Administration, the federal agency that sells the power from Hoover Dam<\/a>, among other things. It also has firm rights to send power over the lines into California, and it\u2019ll be pseudo-tied to California\u2019s grid. A pseudo-tie basically lets a plant that\u2019s physically in one grid operator\u2019s territory act like part of another\u2019s, so California\u2019s grid operator can treat Sterling as one of its own plants. Trade publication pv magazine reported in July that the power\u2019s meant for Tesla\u2019s California operations.<\/p>\n

ContourGlobal hasn\u2019t said which Tesla sites will use it, what Tesla\u2019s paying or how many years the contract runs, and I couldn\u2019t find anything from Tesla on it. I wouldn\u2019t hold my breath for a price, either, since companies tend to keep those numbers to themselves.<\/p>\n

Antonio Cammisecra, ContourGlobal\u2019s president and CEO, said in the company\u2019s groundbreaking announcement that \u201cour teams engineered the project around the specific needs of our customer.\u201d ContourGlobal bought Sterling while it was still in development and reworked it around what Tesla needed, so it\u2019s basically a made-to-order power plant.<\/p>\n

So how does a solar farm run for 16 hours a day?<\/h2>\n

Cammisecra also says Sterling will be able to deliver power for as many as 16 hours a day. Basically, the panels handle the daylight and the batteries handle the evening.<\/p>\n

Sterling\u2019s battery system is rated at 360 megawatts and 1.4 gigawatt-hours. If you\u2019re wondering why a battery needs two ratings, think of megawatts as horsepower and gigawatt-hours as the size of the gas tank. One tells you how hard the battery can push, and the other tells you how long it can keep that up. Sterling\u2019s batteries can run flat out for about four hours.<\/p>\n

Add a long day of sunshine to about four hours of battery and you can see how the company gets to 16. I\u2019d guess 16 is a best-case number, though, since a December day in the Mojave is a lot shorter than a June one.<\/p>\n

The batteries themselves are lithium iron phosphate, or LFP, with liquid cooling and built-in fire protection. LFP cells hold a little less energy than the nickel-heavy ones in a lot of EVs. They\u2019re a lot less likely to catch fire, though, which you\u2019d probably want if you\u2019re parking more than 300 containers of them in the desert. As far as I can tell, neither of ContourGlobal\u2019s announcements names a battery supplier. Tesla, the customer here, sells its own shipping-container-sized Megapack batteries to power companies, so I\u2019m pretty curious whose cells end up inside.<\/p>\n

Sterling is a 509-megawatt plant, or a 450-megawatt one<\/h2>\n

You\u2019ll see Sterling described both ways. They\u2019re both right. Solar panels make direct current, and 509 megawatts is what Sterling\u2019s panels are rated for. The 450 is what the plant can actually send to the grid once inverters turn that into alternating current, the kind that comes out of your wall outlet.<\/p>\n

The panel maker doesn\u2019t seem to have been named either, so I can\u2019t tell you how big each panel is. Divide 509 megawatts by 760,000 panels, though, and each one works out to somewhere around 670 watts.<\/p>\n

The paperwork says construction started last year<\/h2>\n

ContourGlobal\u2019s July announcement had one line that\u2019s easy to skim past. It said work on Sterling had already started last year, through \u201coff-site physical work of significant nature\u201d that included buying major equipment.<\/p>\n

I doubt that wording was an accident. The IRS uses almost the same phrase, \u201cphysical work of a significant nature,\u201d as its test for when a solar project has officially started construction. For a plant that won\u2019t be finished until 2028, that start date decides whether it can still claim the federal tax credits for wind and solar that Congress started phasing out last year. I couldn\u2019t find anything from ContourGlobal on whether Sterling is claiming them.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re planning a Route 66 road trip, the stretch between Topock and Kingman will probably be a little busier than usual for a while. ContourGlobal expects an average of about 400 people working on Sterling during construction, and it\u2019s aiming to have the plant up and running in 2028.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Solar panels stop making electricity when the sun goes down, and that\u2019s right about when a lot of people get … <\/p>\n

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