Update Q4 2021
We are very excited to be reporting on our activities over the past 6+ months. As you will see below, we are making real progress in getting everything in place so that as soon as Riverside County issues our building permit, we are ready to go forward and break ground on the construction of the GWF’s Pilot Water Farm.
In early May of this year, Jon was up at site on the Salton Sea and took delivery of our steel building. Good thing we ordered it and paid for it when we did since prices for steel doubled as a result of COVID.
Our next big project was bringing in the various parts of the parabolic mirror assemblies. We had the trusses and frames we needed for our parabolic mirror arrays stored in El Centro and so the goal was to transfer everything to site.
Our next big project was getting the parabolic mirrors from Kramer Junction. These are the mirrors that we will be mating to the trusses that are on site. This was a bit of a challenge – Jon and I spent two weeks (not consecutive) living in Barstow and commuting to Kramer Junction at 5 am each morning to work with two crews to first, carefully detach the mirrors from their frames, then move them to where they could be packed into trailers for transport.
Jon designed an ingenious rack that allowed us to safely move over 100 mirrors at a time. Each mirror was roughly 5 feet by 5 feet 4mm thick and weighed 55 lbs. We carried and handled each and every one of the nearly 1000 mirrors we ended up packing – roughly 500 per trailer. It’s probably worth mentioning that there are two types of mirrors and that they have different parabolic curves that determine their placement on the frames as well as their thermal focus point. One trailer contains mirrors for the outer part of the parabola and the other trailer will have the inner mirrors.
Once we get through the tricky and pretty dangerous job of getting the mirrors off the frames and onto the rack, we then have to get them off the rack and into the trailers which is a tricky and dangerous job too.
One of the trailers with mirrors has arrived at site and we will be taking delivery of the second trailer this week.
Please feel free to take a look at the ‘Visuals’ sections where we will be uploading some of the short candid videos of the projects mentioned above. As always, thanks so much for your support and interest. Be on the lookout for our next update which will include “Breaking Ground” on the pilot as well as the start to excavation. We will have to move a bit of dirt in order to lay the foundations down 12 feet deep across our 130’ by 100’ footprint for our evaporation pools. Can’t wait.