California utility PG&E this morning is set to announce its latest wind power deal, an agreement to buy 150 megawatts from a new Solano County project that now gives the utility more than 1 gigawatt of wind energy under contract. The wind farm north of San Francisco will go online in December 2008 and will be operated by enXco, a Southern California green power company owned by French energy firm EDF Energies Nouvelle. EnXco also runs wind farms in the Midwest and has a deal to supply 205.5 megawatts of wind power to San Diego Gas & Electric (SRE). PG&E (PCG) has lagged its Southern California counterparts in tapping wind energy. For instance, late last year in a single deal with an Australian wind developer, Southern California Edison (EIX) contracted to buy 1.5 gigawatts – 10 times the size of the enXco agreement. One gigawatt can power some 750,000 homes. Such projects in SoCal’s windy Tehachapi region face at least one big hurdle: Without multibillion-dollar transmission line upgrades, there’s no way to get all that greenhouse gas-free power from the wind farms to Southern California cities. Even with all the wind energy under development in California, the state ranks a distant second to Texas, where wind wildcatters are thinking big. Billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens, for one, plans to prospect the skies by building a 4-gigawatt wind farm on 200,000 acres.
PG&E to Generate a Gigawatt of Wind Power
October 29, 2007 by Todd Woody
Green Wombat 
Power can come into California from other states’ oil and coal plants but when its wind power all of a sudden the transmission lines need “multi-billion” dollar upgrades?
{I’m not saying that the CA system doesn’t need upgrades I’m just pointing out how anti-green some reporters are – first “It won’t work.”, then “It’s too expensive.” and now that you’ve made the technology work and made it economical …. um, um, … “transmission lines” – please how weak it that!}