For the third year running, “The Imperial Valley Economic Development Corporation” based in California, will be announcing its “Imperial Valley Renewable Energy Summit and Expo.” Scheduled to take place in Quechan Casino and Resort in Imperial Valley, with the theme for 2010 being “Growing California’s Green Economy”. The event will take place between March 16-18.

The summit is directed towards the creation of a green-collared workforce and at the same time achieving all the investments towards renewable energy projects in the Imperial Valley.
Tim Kelly, Executive Director of the IVEDC was quoted saying that the Imperial Valley could be a major source of California’s renewable energy in the future as it is estimated to generate over 40,000 megawatts of renewable energy. The prime goal of this summit is to form a community of renewable energy investors, developers and educators to boost the states economy whiling meeting its need of green energy and utilization of its workforce.

The executive order was signed by Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Governor of California in September 2009 that required the state to utilize its renewable resources like geothermal, solar and wind power by 2020 in order to draw at least 33 percent of electricity from it. This year sees a breakeven in the number of attendees towards this summit as compared to 2009, as more and more independent power produces are interested in the development of renewable energy generation.

Imperial County of California could be considered as “The Renewable Energy Capital of the World”, as the three day summit progresses which will have intellectual speakers, banquet and a networking banquet. The key topics focused in this summit would be based on the promising resources like geothermal, biofuel and solar. New geothermal facilities are being currently established and built at Imperial County for its expansion. Currently it generates about 500 megawatts of electricity and their plan is to push it up to generate about 2,000 megawatts of electricity.
Apart from this, biofuels and solar would be considered towards the development of renewable energy. Imperial Valley is considered to be a prime location for biofuel production. It has nearly 500,000 acres of the most productive farms which could be used to produce new ethanol plants using corn, sugar car pr cellulosic technology which would contribute towards biofuel and lastly Imperial County has abundant private and public lands which gets 360 days of annual sunshine, therefore it will soon see the developments of new solar energy projects.