Solar farms can be havens for rare plants. Just ask the threecorner milkvetch.

In the desert outside of Las Vegas, the Gemini Solar Project took a gentler approach, instead trying to preserve the ecosystem. According to a new study, it paid off for the threecorner milkvetch: Before the development, scientists found 12 plants on the site, and afterward in 2024 found 93, signifying that the seeds survived construction. Compared to a nearby plot of land, the plants at Gemini grew wider and taller, and produced more flowers and fruits. That might be because the solar panels shade the soil, slowing evaporation, which makes more water available to the plants to grow big and strong. “So you just have the potential for a lot more plants,” said Tiffany Pereira, an ecologist at the Desert Research Institute and lead author of the paper, which was published late last year. “There’s seedlings of so many other species coming up as well. And so the fact that seed bank survived is phenomenal.”

It’s yet more evidence that solar farms can be built in ways that minimize disturbances to ecosystems. (The company behind the Gemini project, Primergy, did not respond to requests for comment.) This technique is called ecovoltaics: Instead of blade-and-grade, facilities are built with native species in mind. To give the ecosystem a boost, for instance, a crew can seed the soils with native grasses and flowers. “Some of those seed mixes do quite well at solar facilities, and they attract pollinators, birds, and other wildlife as a result,” said Lee Walston, an ecologist at Argonne National Laboratory who wasn’t involved in the new paper. “Sort of asking that umbrella, Field of Dreams, question, right: If you build it, will they come?”

Located in the heart of the sun-soaked Mojave Desert, and just 30-minutes outside of Las Vegas, Primergy developed Gemini, a 690 MWac solar + 380 MW 4-hour battery energy storage project located on federal land managed by the BLM in Clark County, Nevada. The project is carefully sited and generates enough clean, reliable energy to power approximately 10 percent of Nevada’s peak power demand. Gemini is the largest co-located solar plus battery energy storage project operating in the US, providing a consistent, dispatchable energy resource specifically designed to support Nevada’s peak energy demands. The size, scale and integration of battery storage makes Gemini one of the most sophisticated clean energy projects ever developed: https://www.primergygemini.com/project-overview.

The total $1.9 billion in debt and tax equity financing successfully closed in April 2022, after 18 months of work involving over 100 people. Only then could construction begin in earnest.

Of course, just a couple of months later, the Biden administration passed the Inflation Reduction Act, and what had been a closed deal suddenly cracked open. Because the IRA restructured tax credits for solar energy, the Gemini project had some new math to do.

“In the case of Gemini, the production tax credit was substantially more valuable than the investment tax credit,” Larrison said. “So we changed the financing of the deal leading up to mechanical completion from an investment tax credit to a production tax credit.”

That required renegotiating the financing with all the players involved, and changing all the documentation: https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/inside-the-financing-of-nevadas-massive-new-solar-plus-storage-project/.