With the holidays approaching, the Department of Energy’s request for information for potential carbon-free power projects at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina has been extended until Jan. 2, the agency said Wednesday.
Information on the clean energy potential of the 310-square-mile federal complex is now due by 12 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday Jan. 2, according to the notice posted via the System for Award Management (SAM.gov).
The prior deadline was this Friday, Nov. 17.
In October, DOE announced the information requests to explore the carbon-free power potential of both the Savannah River Site and the Idaho National Laboratory. There are four tracts of relatively flat land spread across 2,000 acres at the South Carolina nuclear complex that might be suitable for power generation, DOE has said.
DOE’s Cleanup to Clean Energy program is meant to help reach President Joe Biden’s target of using the equivalent of 100% carbon-free energy at federal agencies by 2030. Savannah River will focus on offsetting the annual electricity consumption from fossil fuels by generating an equivalent amount of power from solar, wind, geothermal or small modular reactors, according to the information request.
To meet the target, the Savannah River Site would need to offset about 180,000 megawatt hours annually by 2030 and 360,000 megawatt hours annually by 2032.
“One of the goals of the RFI [request for information] is to understand how long the term of a lease agreement would need to be to attract interest from developers,” DOE said in material accompanying the latest notice. The federal site currently has a lease with a developer in an unrelated field, with a lease “considerably longer than 20 years.”
