PG&E to announce biggest solar-power deals in its history
Article Launched: 03/31/2008 09:01:00 PM PDT
Pacific Gas & Electric today will announce the largest series of solar-power
contracts in the utility's history. The deal, to buy as much as 900
megawatts of electricity - or enough to power 540,000 California homes each
year - involves five plants to be built over the next decade.
If the solar-thermal power plants designed by Oakland's BrightSource Energy
become operational, a significant amount of power for PG&E customers could
come from the sun that beats down on the Mojave Desert.
"From what I know, this is the biggest commitment ever in the history of
solar," said John Woolard, BrightSource Energy's chief executive officer and
president. "It's a fairly significant undertaking on both sides."
Building all five plants in the Mojave will cost $2 billion to $3 billion,
Woolard said. The project - which faces regulatory and financing hurdles -
could mean 2,000 construction jobs, and employ about 1,000 workers to
operate the plants. PG&E didn't disclose the financial details of the
contracts.
BrightSource's founder and chairman is Arnold Goldman, whose now-defunct Luz
International built nine solar plants in the Mojave Desert between 1984 and
1990. They're still operating.
BrightSource uses what it calls distributed power towers, or DPTs, in which
sunlight from thousands of movable mirrors are concentrated to heat water to
more than 1,000 degrees in a boiler to make steam. That steam feeds a
turbine that makes electricity.
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BrightSource will begin the first demonstration of its technology at a
small-scale plant in Israel in April. It anticipates the first of its five
California plants for PG&E, a 100-megawatt facility, will be up and running
"as early as 2011," Woolard said. That plant, and a larger 200-megawatt one
scheduled to begin operation in 2012-2013, will be built on the Ivanpah
dry-lake bed in San Bernardino County.
Three other BrightSource 200-megawatt solar plants also are planned to be
built, from 2014 to 2016, at Broadwell dry lake, about 100 miles southwest
of Ivanpah.
"The Upper Mojave has world-class sun," Woolard said. "We focus a lot on
sunshine."
PG&E has previously announced deals to get 553 megawatts from Solel, an
Israeli company with plans to build a solar plant elsewhere in the Mojave
Desert, and 117 megawatts from Palo Alto's Ausra at a future San Luis Obispo
County plant. Since 2007, the utility has announced deals that could result
in 1,931 megawatts of power from solar, wind, wave and geothermal sources.
"As we look to build our renewable portfolio, we know there are a wide
variety of not just renewable sources, but also a wide variety of
technologies available," PG&E spokeswoman Jennifer Zerwer said.
Publicly-owned California utilities such as PG&E must get 20 percent of
their power from renewable sources by 2010, but they can meet the
requirement with contracts if the projects go online by 2013.
PG&E, which gets 14 percent of its energy from renewable sources now,
already has contracts in hand that exceed that 20 percent goal, Zerwer said.
Other states have similar mandates, called renewable portfolio standards,
which seek to reduce dependency on fossil fuels. Those standards, concerns
about climate change and policies such as California's trend-setting
global-warming law AB 32 and its solar-roof initiative continue to spawn
action. In the last week alone:
. Southern California Edison said it would spend $875 million to put solar
cells on 65 million square feet of commercial buildings, enough to generate
250 megawatts of electricity.
. The FPL Group, a subsidiary of Florida Power & Light, said it would build
a 250-megawatt Beacon Solar Energy Project on 2,000 acres in Kern County and
have it running by 2011.
. The Dine Wind Project, a partnership between the Navajo Nation and
Boston's Citizens Energy, would put hundreds of 400-feet tall windmills in
the Gray Mountain area, about 50 miles north of Flagstaff, Ariz.
PG&E said in 2007 that it wanted to buy 500 megawatts from BrightSource.
Today's announcement formalizes and expands that goal.
"These are exciting times for the industry," Woolard said. "Really the
challenge is that there needs to be hundreds of plants like this one
constructed, built and delivered. With the carbon issue, we've got to be
able to do things at a size and scale that's meaningful." |
