The Duchesne County Commission approved a letter of support in July to be sent to the U.S. Department of Energy regarding the Clean and Resilient Energy program for rural communities. The University of Utah is proposing a solar based power plant project to the Department of Energy’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstration. The letter from Duchesne County listed the following among the benefits of the proposed project: The proposed solar-based power plant contributes to the county’s current efforts in developing clean energy solutions to respond to the growing demand; The proposed integrated battery energy storage system will provide valuable dispatchable resources for local utilities to maintain power reliability; The proposed training and certificate programs that will be co-offered by the University of Utah and UBTech will strengthen our local workforce in renewable energy; The development, installation, deployment, interconnection, and O&M of this project will all involve the local workforce, thus providing short-term and long-term job opportunities; And finally, once commissioned, the power plant will provide the county with new tax revenue streams.
