Rioglass deal includes interesting details

The Rioglass Solar announcement on Wednesday was made a day before the Surprise City Council got its hands on the development agreement. Fortunately, these things are so hammered out in advance of a council approval that there usually aren’t any changes, let alone ones that would make headlines.

There are some always interesting things in the development agreements that don’t show up in press releases and news stories. I’ve read more than a few of these over the years, so I skimmed it for the interesting tidbits

The incentives part of the agreement is where you see some of the legal wrangling. The city is giving Rioglass about $1 million in fee rebates and infrastructure improvements to their site. Rioglass can end the agreement any time prior to incurring those incentives and walk away. If they close up before the 10 years of the agreement and after they’ve collected the incentives, they’ve got to pay the city back.

The city will help Rioglass apply for state and federal training grants, as job training is important to solar companies. Goodyear also shelled out some training funds to help land Suntech Power Holdings Co. Ltd.

The site, near Milgard Way and Varney Road, is one Surprise has pushed for several years to land manufacturing facilities. The benefit Rioglass gets is that it backs up to a rail spur to make it easier to get the mirrors out to the solar fields in western Arizona.

Rioglass is scheduled to begin construction by March 1, 2011 and be done by the end of next year. But in many of these sort of developments, those time lines slip. That said, given that Abengoa is going to be purchasing mirrors from Rioglass, they may need them even sooner than that.