photo: Southern California Edison
It hasn’t received much media attention, but the California Public Utilities Commission has just proposed instituting a first-of-its-kind reverse auction market to spur renewable energy development — mainly solar photovoltaic. As I write today in The New York Times:
California regulators are taking an eBay approach to ramping-up renewable energy in the Golden State.
In what might be a world first, the California Public Utilities Commission on Thursday proposed letting developers bid on contracts to install green energy projects. A solar company that offers to sell electricity to one of California’s three big utilities at a rate lower than its competitors would win a particular power purchase agreement.
This “reverse auction market” feed-in tariff is designed to avoid the pitfalls the have plagued efforts in Europe to encourage development of renewable energy by paying artificially high rates for electricity produced by solar power plants or rooftop photovoltaic projects.
You can read the rest of the story here:
Green Wombat 
Don’t know much about all this but in the last month almost 2000 MW’s worth of solar-thermal have applied to be built in California. Ambengoa at 250 MW’s, Solar Millennium has two projects. One for 484 MW’s and one for 1000 MW’s. Last today Nextera applied for one at 250 MW’s. Not sure how many of these will get built but things are definitely starting to change. By my count that is 10 individual plants ranging between 125 MW’s to 250 MW’s. All pretty much using the same technology. It is going to be interesting the next couple of years.
And another solar-thermal plant applied to be built yesterday. Solar Millennium applied to build another 480 MW project near Ridgecrest California. The California Energy Commission website is a little confusing because it says 480 MW’s but the link says one project at 250 MW’s. By my count that is over 2400 MW’s worth of projects applying to be built in California in less than a month.
Todd any chance you might do an article about Solar Millennium? It looks like they are based in Berkeley. Anyway they seem to have some very ambitious plans.
Stay tuned, Steve. You’ll see something soon.