A Million-Panel Project

NASA satellite imagery is capturing Utah's energy transformation: the Green River Energy Center, a solar facility with nearly a million photovoltaic panels, went online in Castle Valley this June. With four hundred megawatts of solar capacity and four hundred megawatts of battery storage, the plant is slated to power more than one hundred thousand homes across Salt Lake City and the state. The location tells the story: Castle Valley has been a coal mining hub since the eighteen hundreds, yet solar has grown to fourteen percent of Utah's electricity generation in twenty twenty-five, up from nearly zero a decade earlier, while coal has fallen from seventy-five to fifty percent. The Green River Center reuses transmission lines originally built for coal plants, turning Utah's former mining infrastructure into the backbone for its renewable energy future.

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