...constructed last Summer, nine acres of solar panels producing enough power for 215 homes, and expected to save the County of Santa Clara some $7,100,000 in charges for electrical power over 25 years.
It happens to be installed along Highway 87, the road I take to the airport - but I knew nothing about it and had not driven that highway in daylight for months, so the existence of the mammoth 9-acre Solar PV installation came as a surprise to me this past week.
It is somewhat controversial because upon that same land were discovered Ohlone Indian remains during the highway excavation three decades ago. However, nobody ever did the paperwork or filed reports to reserve the land. The PV panels are installed on galvanized pipes driven into the ground, and when they dug a trench down one side to run power cables, no remains turned up - a local university monitored this closely.
There is no doubt this is an Indian burial site. The construction of the PV installation over it may have been an inadvertent error, or it may have been done deliberately, but it was completely legal. I find that I am in favor of the project - and from my admittedly white perspective, it doesn't seem disrespectful to gather power from this site.
The facility you see in the upper left of the photo is a light rail station, the tracks run down the center median of highway 87. My house is off to the left of the photo, at the base of the first row of hills. The two rows of hills delineate the Almaden Valley, once almost all vineyards, but today suburbs and larger properties favored by "horse" people.
