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View search results on mapThe Continental Divide curves around the northern base of an old volcano called Bandera Crater. The crater is one of several in this area that created the massive volcanic flow known as the Malpais Lava Beds, as if the lava flowed out of a crack in the Continental Divide, and flowed towards the eastern drainage before freezing solid, 10,000 years ago. The lava fields cover a hundred square miles, and in places are nearly impossible to walk on.
A few miles southwest of Silver City, the Continental Divide enters Freeport-McMoRan’s Tyrone Operations. This has been an active open pit copper mine since 1967, one of two in the area (the other is the Chino operation, ten miles east of Silver City). Mining here started a hundred years ago, as an underground operation. The town of Tyrone was built in 1915 by the Phelps Dodge Corporation to house workers for the mine.
According to the USGS, the Continental Divide crosses Interstate 10 27 miles west of Deming, and 33 miles east of Lordsburg, at a point near the base of the eastbound off-ramp of exit 55. The highway department, however, marks the Divide with a road sign two miles west. But it seems to matter less by this point. It’s pretty flat, either way. The Southern Pacific Railroad first came through here in the 1880s. The interstate followed the route 80 years later.
San Luis Pass is a dirt road that goes over the Continental Divide, four miles north of the border. It once was a county road, and the only connection between the Animas and Playas Valleys, but is now controlled by the landowners, the Diamond A Ranch, which keep it closed and off limits to the public, rendering the southernmost pass over the Divide impassable.
The remote Playas Valley contains the remains of Phelps Dodge’s Hidalgo Copper Smelter, built here in 1971, to process copper from the mines near Silver City, which came by rail through Lordsburg. The remote site was chosen as the process was dirty, emissive, and used toxic materials. The smelter closed in 1999, and has mostly been torn down. Its 600-foot tall stack was toppled in 2007. Remediation efforts, including addressing soil and groundwater contamination, continue.
The Antelope Wells port of entry, on Highway 81 south of Hachita, is the only border crossing in the New Mexico Bootheel, the remote rectangular southwesternmost corner of the state that hangs below the rest of the state, and meets with Arizona. The port of entry is located a few miles east of the Continental Divide.
One of six of the initial major dedicated data centers built across the USA by Google, this one is in Lenoir, North Carolina, an old furniture making town on the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains. There are two separate buildings, one of which, along Overlook Drive, is much larger than the first, and has more than doubled in size since it was constructed around 2010.
In the farmland outside Maiden, North Carolina, not too far from Google’s data center in Lenoir, is one of Apple’s principal data centers, in two separate buildings, with more on the way. Across the street, the company has built a solar plant, which provides a small fraction of the power the facility consumes.
What is possibly Facebook’s largest dedicated data center complex is next to the highway near the town of Forest City, North Carolina. One building broke ground in 2010, and a second building opened in late 2013, and a third has also been completed. It is about an hour away from an Apple data center in Maiden, North Carolina, and a Google data center in Lenoir.
Agua Caliente is one of the largest solar power plants in the nation. Located west of Gila Bend, Arizona, the plant produces more than 250 megawatts, and is expected to produce as much as 397 megawatts when it is complete. The plant has 5,200,000 photovoltaic panels, covering around 2,400 acres. Construction began in 2011, and it cost around $1.8 billion. First Solar and NRG Solar are the builders and operators of the plant.
Antelope Valley Solar Ranch went online with 150 megawatts in 2013, and is expected to produce more than 230 megawatts when it is complete. Construction started in 2011, and at least 3,700,000 photovoltaic panels, built by First Solar, are now installed, covering around 2,100 acres in the western Antelope Valley of Southern California. The plant cost around $1.4 billion, and is among the 30 or so largest solar plants in the USA.
California Valley Solar Ranch is one of two solar power plants in the high and dry Carrizo Plain of Southern California. Construction started in 2011, and was complete in 2013, with the installation of its 749,088th photovoltaic panel. It was built by the Sun Power Corporation and NRG Solar, at a cost of $1.6 billion, and produces as much as 250 megawatts, from ten separate solar fields. It is among the top 30 or so largest solar plants in the USA.
Centinela is one of a few large photovoltaic power plants in the southwestern Imperial Valley, west of Calexico, California. Construction started in 2012, and it has at least a 170 megawatt capacity. It was built by Fluor and the LS Power Group, at a cost of around $1.8 billion. It is adjacent to the Tanaska Solar Plant, and near the Mount Signal Solar Power Plant.
Mount Signal Solar is one of a few large photovoltaic plants in the southwestern Imperial Valley, west of Calexico. Construction started in 2012, and the plant started producing more than 100 megawatts in late 2013. When it is complete, it is expected to produce 265 megawatts. It has changed hands a few times, and been called a few things, including Imperial Valley Solar 1, and has been owned by Abengoa, Silver Ridge, and 8 Minute Energy. It cost around $1.5 billion.
Construction started on this 250 megawatt photovoltaic power plant in 2013, and was completed in 2015. It is located in the El Dorado Valley, South of Las Vegas, near some other major solar plants. It was built by AMEC and Sempra Energy, at a cost around $1.5 billion.
Desert Sunlight is one of the largest solar power plants in the nation, with an output of 550 megawatts. Construction started in 2011, north of the remote Mojave town of Desert Center. Built by First Solar, Nextera, GE, and Sumitomo, the plant cost $2 billion, covers 3,800 acres, and uses 8,800,000 photovoltaic panels.
Genesis is a solar thermal power plant that began construction in 2011, and was producing 250 megawatts when it went online in 2014. It is located on the north side of Ford Dry Lake, west of Blythe, California. Genesis was built by Nextera, and cost around $1.5 billion. It is one of the largest parabolic trough-type power plants, with 600,000 concave mirrors that follow the sun and focus sunlight on a heat transfer fluid flowing through tubes in the troughs.
When it went online in early 2014, Ivanpah was likely the largest solar power plant in the world. It is certainly the largest thermal solar power plant, with 3,500 acres of mirrors mounted on 173,500 heliostats, which track the sun, focusing it on three 450 foot tall towers full of flowing water, which generates steam, then electricity–as much as 392 megawatts. Construction started on the plant in 2011, built by Bechtel, Birightsource, NRG, and Google, at a cost of $2.2 billion.
The Mesquite Solar Plant is among the top 30 or so largest solar plants in the USA. Construction started in 2011, and the plant was producing 150 megawatts by 2013. It is a photovoltaic plant, with millions of panels, being built by Sempra Energy and Consolidated Edison. It is being built In phases, and may produce as much as 700 megawatts when it is done, which might make it the largest in the nation.
The Mojave Solar Project is a solar power plant started in 2011, and finished in 2014. It is a solar thermal plant, using mirrored parabolic troughs, not photovoltaic panels. At 280 megawatts, it is among the largest plant of this type in the nation.
When Solana was completed in 2013 it was the largest thermal solar plant in the nation. It produces 280 megawatts, using the circulating heated oil system known as parabolic troughs, with concave mirrors in rows that track the sun, heating up a heat transfer fluid, generally Therminol, that makes steam, and then power.
Topaz is the larger of two major solar power plants in the remote Carrizo Plain of California. Construction started in 2011 by First Solar, and when it was completed in 2014, with over 9 million photovoltaic panels, it was producing 550 megawatts, making it the largest solar power plant in the world at that time. Part of the plant was built on the site of the Carrizo Solar Plant, built by the oil company ARCO.
Crescent Dunes Solar Plant is a 110-megawatt solar facility north of Tonopah, Nevada, which went online in 2014. Like the bigger Ivanpah Plant that went online south of Las Vegas, this is a central collecting thermal type. It has a 550-foot tall tower, surrounded by 17,500 heliostats that reflect sunlight onto it, heating a molten salt, which then makes steam and electricity.
One of the few solar plants outside the southwest that produces more than 50 megawatts is the Martin Next Generation Solar Energy Center, in Indiantown, Florida. Most of the plant makes electricity from natural gas. The solar array, constructed in 2005, uses reflective parabolic trough mirrors to heat brine and generate steam. It is capable of producing 75 megawatts.
One of Echostar’s several earth stations in the USA. Echostar is a communications satellite company serving video and data clients, including Dish TV, which was split off from the company in 2008.
The Atlanta Earth Station is a commercial satellite communication facility, at a site with some other communication towers for microwave, cell, and radio. Most of the site is operated by Century Link, which purchased Level 3 in 2016. Level 3 was one of the large fiber optic and global communications infrastructure companies that survived the telco bust of 2001. It has one of the largest fiber network in the USA, and several undersea cables connecting to South America, and Europe.
Moffett Field, south of San Francisco, was established in 1931 as the West Coast base for the Navy’s rigid airship program. Hangar 1 was built to house the USS Macon, the first airship on base and the third large rigid airship built by the US, which arrived from its trials at Lakehurst, New Jersey in 1933. Two years later it was destroyed in a crash off of Big Sur.
Goodyear's blimp base in Carson, California opened in January 1968, and covers 27 acres. It has been home to at least nine Goodyear blimps since then, but with just five different names: the Columbia, the Eagle, the Spirit of America, the Spirit of Innovation, and now, Wingfoot Two. Wingfoot Two is the second of this latest generation of Goodyear’s blimps, and was delivered in 2017.
The lighthouse at Point Sur, on the central coast of California, sits on a dramatic mound, connected to the shore, often enshrouded in fog. One of the buildings on top of the rock contains an interpretive display about the USS Macon, an airship that crashed into the ocean off the point in 1935, witnessed by the lighthouse keepers at the time. The Macon was the second of two similar rigid airships made in the early 1930s, in Goodyear’s giant hangar in Akron, Ohio.
Richmond Naval Air Station was the largest of eight new blimp bases built in WWII. It covered 2,100 acres, and had three 1,000-foot-long blimp hangars, instead of the usual two. At the center of the base was a large blimp landing and mooring area, now the parking lot for the Miami Zoo, which occupies the southern part of the former base.