photo illustration: PG&E
Even Major League Baseball is going green. Sort of. In a made-for-TV-news media event, executives from the San Francisco Giants and PG&E (PCG) will join SF Mayor Gavin Newsom today to announce that the utility will install a 120-kilowatt solar panel system at AT&T (T) Park. The catch: the 590 Sharp solar panels won’t power the park itself but will feed into San Francisco’s grid. Still, the solar panels that will serve as awnings (photo illustration above) might raise the eco-consciousness of the ticket holders that drive to the bayside park in their Suburbans and Tahoes. Beyond the PR value of portraying San Francisco’s team as the jolly green Giants, there’s a more interesting dynamic at work here: the growing value of commercial rooftops – or awnings in this case – as prime real estate for solar energy companies. In the April issue of Business 2.0 now hitting the streets, Green Wombat edited a story by senior writers Paul Kaihla and Michael Copeland on the land rush to lock up solar and wind sites and the opportunities to 
become a renewable energy broker, selling the rights to locales for wind farms and solar arrays. Typically, solar energy companies like PowerLight (SPWR) and financiers like MMA Renewable Ventures (MMA) install and/or own and operate the solar array and sell the
electricity it produces at a discount to the building owner. Just take a look around at amount of rooftop square footage at the local Costco or regional shopping mall and you’ll get the idea of the opportunity. The Giants-PG&E deal is structured differently but the idea is the same: the utility installs the solar system – PG&E hasn’t disclosed the cost but given similar sized arrays it’ll probably be around $1.2 million – and reaps the benefits of an additional clean, green source of electricity.
Your comment about the fact that it won’t be supplying the Park is misinformed. In fact since it will be supplying power to the grid, which the park uses, it will in fact be supplying the park. 120 kilowatts is more than enough to supply power for 60 single family homes, which is sizable contribution for just a few awnings. With that said, I think you are right about the “land grab” and the city’s own projects to put solar panels on gov’t buildings is certainly a good test case to convince others to do so. Similarly, Lennar Homes just signed a deal with SMUD (Sacramento Muni utility etc.) to put solar panels in one of their development projects. These are encouraging developments, but we still have a long way to go..
Actually, AT&T Park does not buy its power from PG&E but from another provider, according to the San Jose Mercury News. But in the sense that all electricity goes into the grid, your point is taken.
Readers are invited to check their ecological footprint (for free) at http://www.myfootprint.org
The A’s should put panels on the (no longer used) top deck of their stadium!
When I worked for Sandia National Labs in Albuquerque back in the 1970s and 1980s, we did a major study for the Department of Energy (then called Energy Research and Development Administration ERDA)on the feasibility of large companies collecting energy from solar panels and selling back to utilities. We also worked on wind turbines, geophysical thermal, oil extraction from shale, enhanced oil recovery from old wells, as well as many other energy projects. Unfortunately, most of the this projects were negelected when oil became vey cheap again in the 1980s.