Tag Archives: First Solar

Solar projects taking off in Imperial and Kern counties — the math of PPAs

Posted: April 1st, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: The Green Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Southern California Edison may have backed out of its agreement to put a 10-megawatt solar plant at College of the Desert’s West Valley campus in Palm Springs, but it’s still signing contracts with other solar developers to buy electricity from their projects.

8minuteenergy Renewables, a Folsom-based solar developer, announced Monday it has signed a 20-year power purchase agreement (PPA) with Edison for its 20-megawatt Redcrest solar project in Kern County. 8minute is partnering with saferay, a German solar developer with U.S. offices in Palo Alto, for the project. (Obviously, lower case names are in vogue among solar developers these days. Somewhere e.e. cummings is smiling.)

The contract was negotiated through Edison’s Renewable Auction Mechanism, the small-solar program the utility wants to use  instead of developing small community-based projects, such as the cancelled COD solar plant. The contract will have to get final approval from the California Public Utilities Commission.

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According to the 8minute announcement:

The Redcrest Solar Farm project is a utility-scale solar generation facility sited on 160 acres of low-productivity farmland.  Construction is projected to begin in 2014, with the site expected to be operational and delivering renewable energy by mid-2015.  This clean solar generation plant will displace the equivalent of approximately 54,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year, which is equal to the amount that roughly 2.2 million trees would displace annually.

 It will also generate 50 construction jobs.

Meanwhile, in Imperial County, First Solar of Tempe, the original developer of Desert Sunlight, has acquired the 150-megawatt Solar Gen 2 project. The project has a 25-year power purchase agreement with San Diego Gas & Electric.

The numbers on this one are, predictably, larger than Redcrest.

The photovoltaic (PV) solar plant will generate enough electricity to power more than 60,000 average California homes, displacing more than 115,000 metric tons of CO2 per year (the equivalent of taking 22,000 cars off the road) and saving 93,000 metric tons of water per year.

When the project begins construction, sometime this year, it will create 800 jobs, company officials said.

First Solar developed the 550-megawatt Desert Sunlight project, located near Desert Center and now owned by NextEra Energy of Florida and GE. The only other project it has in development at present is the 300-megawatt Stateline plant in San Bernardino, which has a power purchase agreement with Edison.

Why does Edison seemingly have no problem with buying power from other developers but remain so reluctant to do even small projects of its own? The obvious answer is profits. Developing solar still carries high front-end costs.

But once completed, solar farms produce their energy at hours of the day that correlate with peak customer usage, when the utility can charge customers higher rates, even as the prices they are paying on PPAs continue to fall.

 

 

First Solar loses loan guarantee on Topaz

Posted: September 23rd, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: The Green Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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In recent days, the Department of Energy has been finalizing a flurry of renewable energy projects ahead of a Sept. 30 deadline for some of its loan guarantees – but one of them won’t be First Solar’s 550-megawatt Topaz project in San Luis Obispo County.

The Arizona company announced Thursday that Topaz would not meet all the requirements for the conditional $1.9 billion loan guarantee the DOE granted it in June. Company officials would not go into details on exactly what requirements were not met, but they stressed this does not mean they are walking away from the project.

“First Solar’s business model is to develop projects and build and operate and maintain them, ” said Alan Bernheimer, a company spokesman. “We’re not in the business of wanting to own them. Typically we bring in equity investors and potentially some debt around the time construction starts.”

The company is in talks with investors and looking at other debt options to move the project forward without the loan guarantee, he said.

Bernheimer also said that First Solar is not expecting similar problems for its 550-megawatt Desert Sunlight project, now just beginning construction near Desert Center. It received a $1.88 billion conditional loan guarantee in June.

The company also has a third project, its 230-megawatt Antelope Valley solar ranch, in the pipeline for a $680 million DOE loan guarantee.

Is the Topaz situation yet another ripple in the ever-widening impact of the Solyndra bankruptcy and congressional investigation?

Bernheimer thinks not.  Utility-scale solar projects, such as Topaz and Desert Sunlight, are a different animal from solar manufacturers and the risks to the government and taxpayers are much less.

“These projects have long-term power purchase agreements with utilities,” he said.  “The fixed payments are going to be a reliable revenue stream.”

Still, the DOE has to finalize the loan guarantees for Desert Sunlight and Antelope Valley next week — and everyone will be watching. 

 

NextEra’s next solar plant will be PV

Posted: September 2nd, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: The Green Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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As it begins construction on its 250-megawatt Genesis solar thermal project east of the Coachella Valley, NextEra Energy has its second desert solar plant in the works.

The company has filed an application with the Bureau of Land Management for a 750-megawatt photovoltaic plant, called the McCoy Solar Energy Project, to be located 13 miles northwest of Blythe. The BLM filed a notice of the application in the Federal Register earlier this week, which means the official scoping period has begun, during which the agency collects public input on what issues it needs to look at for its official environmental impact report.  The deadline to submit comments to the agency for this round will be Sept. 28.

The available information on McCoy thus far is sketchy.  The project site includes 7,700 acres of public land and 470 acres of private land, which means the BLM will have to partner with Riverside County for the environmental impact report.  To connect to the grid, the project will need a 16-mile tie-line to connect with Southern California Edison’s Colorado River substation, and the right of way for that line will include both public and private land.

According to the company’s initial application, the McCoy project would generate enough electricity to power 225,000 homes. On the jobs front, NextEra estimates it about 600 jobs during peak construction and 13-20  for ongoing operation.

The fact that NextEra has chosen photovoltaic panels over solar thermal for this second project reflects the ongoing shift to PV for utility-scale solar plants — a trend driven by the plunging costs of panels and, hopefully, an easier permitting process.

NextEra had a difficult time permitting Genesis as solar thermal, primarily over water issues. Solar thermal requires a lot of water, and NextEra originally planned Genesis using the most water-intensive “wet cooling” technology, which led to long wrangles over whether the project would tap into the Colorado River aquifer. The BLM pushed back and the company had to change to more water-efficient “dry cooling” technology to get the project approved.

The tradeoff here is that while PV uses almost no water, it isn’t as reliable a power source as solar thermal, which uses heat from solar troughs to run steam turbines. The turbines create a smoother power flow compared to the spikier electricity coming from PV panels that convert sunlight directly to electricity.

While it is impossible to know at this point,  in the past, the BLM has held at least two public scoping meetings per project on the solar plants it has already approved in the Riverside East solar zone — one in the Coachella Valley, usually at UCR Palm Desert, and one in Blythe.  Given the Sept. 28 deadline, whatever’s going to happen will likely be happening soon.

I will be following up on this next week along with First Solar’s Desert Sunlight project to see how many valley residents have gotten call backs from the job fairs the company held almost three weeks ago.

Here’s hoping the Labor Day weekend will be followed by green jobs for some of the 1,200 valley job seekers who turned out at the Spotlight 29 Casino to apply for work on Desert Sunlight last month.

RER update: Green training, jobs and industry clusters

Posted: July 21st, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: The Green Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
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Per usual, the Coachella Valley Economic Partnership’s Renewable Energy Roundtable was buzzing with good news on the latest developments on the valley’s green scene.

First and foremost, Larry McLaughlin, who heads up College of the Desert’s Desert Enterprise Center in Palm Springs, announced the facility has received a $600,000 grant from the state Economic Development Department and the California Energy Commission to keep its solar training programs going.

“They wanted us to continue the training we had already established under the clean energy traning program. We’re going to continue the utility scale solar, and also work in energy efficiency, possibly even residential (photovoltaic) or thermal,” McLaughlin said. 

Course and curriculum details are still in the works, he said, “to make sure we’re doing things that are responsive to what’s needed out there in the region. We don’t want to duplicate other people’s efforts; we don’t want to train people for industry areas that aren’t needed. We want to take good care to align program with our region.”

Keeping the center’s training programs up and running is crucial to ensure valley residents have a good shot at landing jobs on the big solar and other energy projects now getting under way — from Solar Millennium’s 1,000-megawatt Blythe project to the Sentinal natural gas peaker plant breaking ground on July 28.

Chuck McDaniel, business development representative for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 440 said the peaker plant, Solar Millennium and First Solar’s Desert Sunlight project all have local hire agreements and the union expects to put a total of 700 of its members to work.

But he said, locally, only about 150-200 are ready to get the jobs.

“We’re going to start major recruiting” for apprenticeship programs, he said. “We figure every electrician in Riverside County that wants to work and can meet our requirements will have a job.” 

Job fairs will be announced in the coming weeks, he said.

COD’s efforts to create a  pipeline for clean green jobs also got a boost in the form of a second grant — $225,000  from the Chancellor’s Office of the California Community Colleges System, McLaughlin said. The money will be used for further development of local Pathways to Success programs to develop middle school and high school programs that will segue into community college classes with an energy orientation, McLaughlin said. The goal is for COD to offer an associate’s degree with an energy-green tech focus.

McLaughlin also talked about the center’s expanding relationships with companies developing solar-related technologies, with the goal of eventually using the center as a testing facility for new products.

The center has forged a connection with Parker Hannafin, a global engineering firm based in Cleveland, which is developing new solar tracking technology — the drivers that help panels or solar troughs move with the sun.

“Parker Hannafin,  they did donate $12,000 worth of equipment that ‘s going to be part of the parabolic trough unit that we are going to build for training purposes,” McLaughlin said. ”They are also interested in the site to demonstrate the tracking drive unit.”

Nothing is signed, but McLaughlin said an engineer from the company will be in the desert in the next few weeks to check things out.

Wes Ahlgren, chief operating officer of CVEP, said these are exactly the kind of relationships the valley needs to build green tech “industry clusters.”

“The Coachella Valley is poised to accept smaller companies that help out big companies,” he said.