Correction: This article has been updated to reflect that Strata Solar LLC does not have a parent company.

City Utilities said Thursday that it will not move forward on a proposed second solar power farm near the Springfield-Branson National Airport.

A new solar farm would have been too expensive for customers, CU said in a recap of its Thursday board meeting. But CU said it will keep looking at renewable power opportunities for the future.

CU told the Springfield Business Journal on Friday that 15 energy companies submitted bids for the project, saying they would charge 5 cents to 12 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity.

Only one bidder, Sun Solar, was based in southern Missouri.

The proposal was a joint project between the airport and CU, according to previous reporting by the News-Leader.

In June, when the airport and CU decided to study whether it made sense to put in a second solar farm, they said the facility would take up 30 acres of land and would add capacity for about 3 more megawatts of energy. They did not set out a timeline for building a second farm.

At the time, CU spokesman Joel Alexander said that putting a solar farm near an airport was desirable because airports are "a gateway to the community." Thus, many visitors would be able to see that Springfield is committed to developing more renewable energy.

The existing solar farm — a 40-acre plant just east of Springfield that is owned by North Carolina-based Strata Solar LLC — was completed in 2014 and has an output of 4.95 megawatts, with 22,000 solar panels. CU owns the land where the farm sits and buys energy produced there.

In late December, CU announced that it had contracted with Italy-based Enel Green Power to become one of four utilities buying energy from the $400 million Diamond Vista wind farm located near Salina, Kansas.

Diamond Vista provides 100 megawatts of electricity to the Springfield area, CU said in a News-Leader report published Dec. 28. With that wind farm added to CU's power-source portfolio, Springfield gets about 40 percent of its energy from renewable sources.

CU has been working to get more "green power" sources into its mix even as demand for electricity is slumping in the United States.

On Jan. 24, the federal government posted an expert report outlining projections for energy consumption from 2019 through 2050.

Based on data models, the feds predict that slow growth in U.S. energy consumption, along with big increases in oil and natural gas production, will change supply and demand such that the United States will start being a net energy exporter in 2020.

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America is expected to continue exporting energy until at least 2050, according to the report.

Natural gas is expected to have the biggest growth, and its prices are low, so the feds predict continued demand for natural gas power.

Meanwhile, power companies will shift to more renewable sources over the next 30 years, and more old coal and nuclear power plants are expected to go offline.

Another factor in play is that homes, businesses and machines are getting ever more energy-efficient, meaning that overall U.S. energy consumption could stay relatively flat, even as the total economy gets bigger.

All that's in keeping with CU's own predictions for Springfield. In March, CU said it expects to see just 1 percent growth in the number of its customers for each year from 2018 to 2022.

But electricity use among those roughly 120,000 customers will steadily decline during that time frame, following a trend CU started seeing in 2015.

Decisions about how much energy is used, and what kinds, are seen as very urgent by scientists and some others due to global increases in temperature that humans have caused in recent centuries.

In a report released by the Trump administration over Thanksgiving weekend, federal officials said climate breakdown could cause hundreds of billions of dollars of losses by 2050, and more harm to the U.S. economy by 2100 than was caused by the Great Recession of 2008.

MORE:

City Utilities of Springfield could build solar farm at airport (June 2018)

City Utilities contracts with Kansas wind farm, boosting Springfield's renewable energy

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