Solar plant could be savior to struggling Lancaster

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Workers install mirrors at an eSolar demonstration plant in Lancaster. The city hopes the company will provide jobs for Antelope Valley residents.

The city and surrounding Antelope Valley have been hard hit by poverty, unemployment and foreclosures. The nearly complete eSolar facility could create jobs and restore a sense of pride.

By Scott Gold, LA Times

They lined up for meatball sandwiches the other night outside the Lancaster Community Shelter, in the cold of the high desert. There was a man in a fedora who'd lost his house to the bank. A college student whose loans fell through. An older woman with curlers in her bag, who planned to do her hair after dinner.

Everyone had a story to tell, a cigarette to borrow, a friend to greet. But soon, the crowd hushed as a young mother and her boyfriend walked toward the door carrying 3-week-old twins. They had no money, nowhere to stay, they said. Between them, they'd applied for a dozen jobs -- she got all gussied up for her interview at Denny's, even borrowed a pair of heels -- but they'd had a run of rotten luck, she said.

The buzz in the Antelope Valley these days is about a company called eSolar, which is putting the finishing touches on a thermal solar energy facility here -- 24,000 mirrors that glitter like diamonds when you approach on Avenue G. There are plans for several more facilities in the area, all larger, the company says.

Local officials are atwitter at the possibilities. Visitors and investors are expected from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. A slew of jobs would be created; there were 225 people working last week on the Avenue G facility alone, most of them locals. Lancaster Mayor R. Rex Parris said the solar plants could be the catalyst to restoring the sort of "intellectual excitement" that existed when aerospace, still a vital industry here, was the only game in town -- when "if it went up, it came out of here," he said.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-ou...story?track=rss

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Lancaster and the surrounding valley are suffering, even by the standards of a community that long ago acclimated to a boom-and-bust cycle. Many here are living on the edge, and some beyond, with tens of thousands more expected to arrive in coming years.

More people are expected to arrive in Lancaster? Why, if it sucks so much?

When Holsinger was young, his father dispensed one piece of advice to the kids: "Last one out, turn out the lights." It was meant, of course, to cut down on the power bill. But Holsinger always suspected it meant something else -- that whoever controlled the flow of electricity would be the last one standing, even if everything else went south.

Uh, no - it really was about the bill.

A striking number of clients lost their homes to the bank; others unwittingly rented rooms in abandoned houses taken over by unscrupulous squatters, only to get kicked out when they were discovered. The shelter is now full every night.

And this exurban wasteland is expecting more new residents?

Why???

[SpiritAlight 1]

Solar energy...right on!

Industry of now and the future.

Time for an update every one!!!!!!!!!!

Yippee!!!

Updates are necessary.

[spookyturtle 9,466]

Steve, why not women with watermelons in your sig instead of mangoes?

[Amby 490]

Steve, why not women with watermelons in your sig instead of mangoes?

doesn't that remind you of that girl we saw last week at that bar in mexico?