A major milestone has been reached Tuesday for Kern County's wind energy industry.
Southern California Edison is celebrating the completion of the first phase of a new transmission line to the southland.
When it's completed, SoCal Edison's Tehachapi project will be a 250-mile high-voltage transmission line, running from eastern Kern County through the Los Angeles basin and the Inland Empire to the city of Ontario, a massive five-billion dollar upgrade that will unleash the full potential of wind farms in Tehachapi and Mojave.
"And you can have all the wind energy in the world, out there in the desert, all the solar, everything, but if you can't deliver that energy you have nothing," said Governor Schwarzenegger.
On any given day, even with good wind conditions, scores of wind turbines sit idle, mainly because the current transmission lines don't have the capacity to take all the power generated there.
That will all change once this transmission line is completed.
"When we complete all of the segments we will be able to bring 4500 megawatts of power, or the equivalent to providing renewable power to three million homes," said Theodore Craver, CEO Edison International.
Completing the first phase of the project, through the Angeles National Forest was no easy feat.
Rather than construct roads to each tower site, a specially-designed helicopter did the heavy lifting installing 23 of these high voltage towers in just one day.
The Tehachapi-Mojave area is one of the leading wind energy producers in the world.
When work is complete on the next seven segments of the line, the door will open on an expansion of Kern County's wind energy industry.
"We are celebrating not only the fact that we have this infrastructure moving forward, but the economic development that comes with it, the thousands and thousands of jobs," said Dian Grueneich, with California Public Utilities Commission.
The transmission project, which should be completed in 2015, is not without its critics.
Most notably, the city of Chino Hills, where high voltage power lines will cut through neighborhoods in the heart of the city.
The Chino Hills City Council is considering challenging the transmission line route in court.
