The inability to interconnect to the grid in Southern California led a wind developer to withdraw its application for permission to build a 126 MW wind farm on thousands of acres of public land on San Bernardino mountain ridge tops. In spite of a 120-day extension approved by the Bureau of Land Management, German firm E ON Climate and Renewables was unable to obtain an agreement with Southern California Edison to interconnect with the utility’s substation by the Oct. 27 deadline, said Joan Patrovsky, Bureau project manager. She noted the substation at issue was Coolwater Lugo, but others say the project would have hooked into Edison’s 115kV Apple Valley-Cottonwood line. Edison would not comment because agreements to interconnect generation projects are confidential. The BLM project manager added that efforts to reach an alternative interconnection deal with the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power also failed to come to fruition. “We accepted their application for withdrawal and the project is closed.” Patrovsky said of E ON. The project would have included about 70 500-foot-high wind turbines. E ON had reserved 10,000 acres for its project, but the wind farm would have covered far fewer acres, according to Patrovsky. Local desert conservation groups were pleased with the Bureau’s approval of the North Peak Energy Project application withdrawal. From Lucerne Valley to Apple Valley, desert and mountain land would have been “cleared, blasted, and leveled for this massively destructive project,” stated the Alliance for Desert Preservation. The land at issue is within the California Desert Conservation plan.