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Posts Tagged ‘San Diego Gas & Electric’

San Diego utility charges ahead with electric car plan

Posted in electric cars, environment, green cars, green policy, San Diego Gas & Electric, smart grid, tagged , , , , , on June 25, 2010| Leave a Comment »

photo: Nissan

This post first appeared on Grist.

With the first mass-market electric cars set to hit California roads later this year, the state’s utilities have been working to ensure that early adopters – who tend to be clustered in places like Berkeley and Santa Monica – don’t overload neighborhood transformers and trigger local blackouts.

One way to do that is to encourage drivers not to plug in all at the same time, say when they arrive home from work and also crank up the air conditioning, is to set variable electricity rates that reward those who wait to charge until demand falls late at night or the wee hours of the morning.

What is unknown is whether such rates will actually change anyone’s behavior.

We’re about to find out. On Thursday, the California Public Utilities Commission approved a pilot project proposed by San Diego Gas & Electric to set variable rates for electric car charging.

“This information is critically important as we contemplate a future with widespread electric vehicle usage, given the additional electricity demand these vehicles create and the associated impacts on the grid,” Michael Peevey, the utilities commission president, said in a statement.

The project, which kicks off in January, will accompany the roll out of 1,000 Nissan Leaf electric cars in the San Diego area and the installation of home charging stations for each driver. Some 1,500 public charging stations will also be installed as well as 50 fast chargers that allow the cars’ batteries to be topped off in a matter of minutes rather than hours.

The San Diego effort is part of program backed by the United States Department of Energy called the EV Project that will put 5,700 Leafs and 2,600 Chevrolet Volts in garages in five states along with 14,650 charging stations and 310 fast chargers.

Under the plan greenlighted by California regulators on Thursday, San Diego Gas & Electric will bill Nissan Leaf drivers a range of rates, from a low of 7 cents a kilowatt/hour for summer “super off peak” charging to a high of 38 cents a kilowatt/hour during peak summer demand.

So will someone who has forked over $109,000 for a Tesla Roadster care about saving 31 cents a kilowatt hour? Probably not. What about the middle-of-the-road buyer of a $20,000 (after tax incentives) Nissan Leaf?

Maybe. But survey data that a California utility executive recently shared with me was not encouraging. Polling of likely electric car buyers showed that they were not particularly charged up about the prospect of saving money by delaying their EV gratification.

Another solution is smart charging. Drivers plug in when they get home but the charger communicates with the power grid to determine the optimal time to flip the switch.

That requires a smart grid and the California Public Utilities Commission on Thursday also approved a comprehensive plan to digitalize the state’s power system.

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The fight to control California’s EV infrastructure

Posted in Better Place, electric cars, energy, environment, green cars, green grid, green policy, PG&E, San Diego Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison, tagged , , , , , , on October 12, 2009| Leave a Comment »

betterplaceplug

photo: Better Place

With electric cars months away from hitting the road, the California Public Utilities Commission has begun the complex task of establishing a regulatory framework for the state’s emerging electric vehicle infrastructure. The biggest fight is likely to be over whether to regulate companies like Better Place, which plans to build an electric car charging network in the state. As I write in The New York Times on Monday:

With electric cars set to hit the mass market next year, a skirmish is breaking out in California over who will control the state’s electric vehicle infrastructure.

The California Public Utilities Commission will write the rules of the electric road and is just starting to grapple with the complex regulatory issues surrounding the integration of battery-powered cars into the state’s electrical grid.

One of the biggest questions is whether to regulate Better Place, Coulomb Technologies and other companies that plan to sell electricity to drivers through a network of battery charging stations.

California’s three big investor-owned utilities have split over the issue.

“The commission should establish its authority to regulate third-party providers of electricity for electric vehicles,” Christopher Warner, an attorney for Pacific Gas & Electric, wrote in a filing with the utilities commission. “Managing the increased electricity consumption and load attributable to electric vehicles in order to avoid adverse impacts on the safety and reliability of the electric grid may be one of the most difficult management challenges that electric utilities will face.”

Southern California Edison, meanwhile, urged the commission to move cautiously, calibrating any regulation to the specific business models of the companies.

San Diego Gas & Electric said the commission does not have the right to regulate companies like Better Place.

You can read the rest of the story here.

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Tessera to build solar dish farm in Arizona

Posted in alternative energy, energy, environment, San Diego Gas & Electric, solar energy, solar power plants, Southern California Edison, Stirling Energy Systems, Tessera Solar, tagged , , , , , on August 19, 2009| 2 Comments »

Stirling SunCatcher

photo: Tessera Solar

Another day, another Big Solar deal.

Tessera Solar on Wednesday said it will build a 1.5 megawatt Stirling solar dish power plant outside Phoenix to supply electricity to utility Salt River Project.

The announcement follows Tuesday’s spate of solar power plant deals. As I wrote in The New York Times, utility Southern California Edison (EIX) agreed to buy 550 megwatts of solar electricity that will be generated by two massive thin-film photovoltaic power plants to be built by First Solar (FSLR). Later in the day on Tuesday, First Solar said that it had struck a deal with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to supply 55 megawatts from a PV farm to be constructed in Southern California’s Imperial Valley.

Tessera Solar is the development arm for Stirling Energy Systems, the maker of the SunCatcher solar dish. The company is developing two huge California projects — a 850-megawatt, 34,000-dish solar farm to be built on 8,230 acres to supply power to Southern California Edison and a 750-megawatt power plant complex for San Diego Gas & Electric (SRE).

The 60-dish Salt River Project solar farm is but a fraction of the California solar farms’ size but will serve as a demonstration project for Tessera’s technology.

Most notable, given the years-long licensing process for big solar power projects in places like California, Tessera plans to break ground next month and bring what it calls the Maricopa Solar plant online in January 2010.

Tessera will lease the project site from Salt River Project and sell the electricity to the utility under a 10-year power purchase agreement.

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The top 10 solar utilities

Posted in alternative energy, energy, environment, PG&E, renewable energy, San Diego Gas & Electric, solar energy, solar power plants, Southern California Edison, tagged , , , , , on May 28, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Top 10 solar utilities

A solar industry trade group on Thursday released its list of the Top 10 solar integrated utilities of 2008 and it will come as no surprise that California’s Big Three utilities took the top three spots.

What is news, and a sign that solar’s reach is extending beyond the Golden State, is that six of the Top 10 solar utilities on the Solar Electric Power Association’s list hail from places like New York and New Jersey.

Still, San Francisco-based PG&E (PCG), which claimed the No. 1 slot, alone connected 84.9 megawatts of photovoltaic solar to the grid in 2008, accounting for 44% of all new solar capacity last year. Southern California Edison (EIX) came in second with 32.4 megawatts and San Diego Gas & Electric (SRE) took third place with 16 megawatts.

Xcel Energy (XEL) in Colorado was close behind with 14.2 megawatts. After that the numbers take a dive to the single megawatts. Still, utilities from not-so-sunny places like Portland, Ore.  made the list.

Southern California Edison is No. 1 when it comes to total installed solar to date — 441.4 megawatts — due largely to the 354 megawatts of electricity generated by nine solar thermal power plants built in the 1980s that continue to operate in the Mojave Desert. PG&E came in second with 229.5 megawatts connected to the grid so far.

Those numbers should skyrocket in the coming years as the California utilities have signed contracts for more than 3 gigawatts of electricity to be produced by large solar farms. Utilities like Arizona Public Service (PNW) — No. 5 on the list for 2008 — are also beginning to contract for solar electricity to be produced by massive megawatt solar power plants.

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California’s green energy spike

Posted in alternative energy, climate change, energy, environment, global warming, PG&E, renewable energy, San Diego Gas & Electric, solar energy, solar power plants, Southern California Edison, tagged , , , , , on February 19, 2009| 4 Comments »

cpuc-rps-report

California quadrupled the amount of renewable energy it installed in 2008 over the previous year, according to a report released Wednesday by the state’s Public Utilities Commission.

The 500 megawatts of green electricity brought online last year represents 60% of all renewable energy generation built since 2002, when California mandated that the state’s investor-owned utilities obtain 20% of their power from renewable sources by 2010. In November, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed an executive order raising the Renewable Portfolio Standard, or RPS, to 33% by 2020.

“Clearly, 2008 was a turning point for the RPS program and contracted projects are beginning to deliver in large numbers,” the California Public Utilities Commission report stated.

The CPUC in 2008 approved projects that would generate 2,812 megawatts of renewable energy for California’s Big Three utilities – PG&E (PCG), Southern California Edison (EIX) and San Diego Gas & Electric (SRE). Impressive numbers but the utilities have acknowledged they are unlikely to meet their renewable energy targets by the 2010 deadline because it takes years to get solar and wind projects online and some will inevitably fail. For instance, the financial crisis has raised questions about just how many of the Big Solar power plants the utilities are relying on will actually get built, though the $787 billion stimulus packaged signed into law Tuesday by President Barack Obama has brightened the solar industry’s prospects.

California increasingly is depending on solar energy to meet its commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions under the state’s landmark 2006 global warming law. According to regulators, utilities received 30% more bids for solar power projects in 2008 than in the previous year while wind farm proposals dropped by half and “very few” geothermal tenders were filed.

The fact that utilities received 24,000 megawatts’ worth of renewable energy bids last year (more than enough, if built, to meet the 33% renewable energy target) speaks to the frothy state of the market. But before solar power plants and other green energy projects can go online they face years-long and often contentious environmental reviews, while a lack of transmission lines to bring all this electricity from the desert to coastal cities remains the green elephant in the room.

Meanwhile, regulators are reviewing a policy change that would seem to undercut the state’s goal of encouraging utilities to generate more renewable energy. On March 12 Feb. 20,the California Public Utilities Commission will consider whether to allow utilities to buy so-called tradable renewable energy credits, or TRECs, from other entities  to meet their green electricity mandates. Such credits are associated with the electricity generated by wind farms, solar power plants and other projects and can be bought and sold. In other words, if a utility finds itself falling short of its renewable energy goals – or just doesn’t want to spend the money procuring green power – it could buy TRECs on the open market.

Green Wombat is awaiting a reply from the utilities commission on whether California utilities could purchase TRECs generated by out-of-state projects – which, of course, would do nothing to reduce the state’s own greenhouse gas emissions.  UPDATE: CPUC spokeswoman Terrie Prosper says that utilities will be able to buy out-of-state TRECs as long as they meet California’s eligibility requirements.

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Utilities turn to thin-film solar for big power

Posted in alternative energy, Ausra, BrightSource Energy, energy, environment, First Solar, green startups, green tech, OptiSolar, PG&E, San Diego Gas & Electric, solar energy, solar power plants, Southern California Edison, Stirling Energy Systems, SunPower, Suntech, tagged , , , , , , on January 23, 2009| 4 Comments »

first-solar-11

With Big Solar thermal power plants bogged down in bureaucracy and facing environmental and financial hurdles, utilities are turning to smaller-scale thin-film solar stations that can be built in a matter of months.

In late December, PG&E (PCG), for instance, signed a 20-year contract for electricity generated  from a 10-megawatt thin-film solar power plant in Nevada owned by energy giant Sempra (SRE) that was officially dedicated on Thursday. The solar farm was built by First Solar (FSLR) in a scant six months. Meanwhile, the utility’s nearly two gigawatts worth of deals with solar thermal power companies won’t start producing power for another two years at the earliest. (Southern California Edison (EIX) and San Diego Gas & Electric signed agreements with solar dish developer Stirling Energy Systems for 1.75 gigawatts in 2005 and those projects are just now beginning to move through the regulatory approval process.) And the financial crisis has made it more difficult for solar thermal developers to obtain the billions of dollars needed to finance the construction of a massive megawatt power plant.

Solar thermal power plants typically use miles of mirrors to heat a fluid to create steam which drives an electricity-generating turbine. Photovoltaic (or PV) solar farms essentially take solar panels similar to those found on residential rooftops and mount them on the ground in huge arrays. (Thin-film solar panels are made by depositing layers of photovoltaic materials on glass or flexible materials.)

“In terms of construction, photovoltaic tends to have a much faster development and construction track,” Roy Kuga, PG&E’s vice president for energy supply, told Green Wombat. “There is a segment of mid-sized projects – in the two to 20 megawatt size – where PV shows a distinct advantage in that market. There’s a huge potential for the PV market to expand.”

That’s good news for companies like First Solar – the Tempe, Ariz.-based company backed by the Walton family that is often called the Google of solar for its stock price and market prowess – and SunPower (SPWRA), the Silicon Valley solar cell maker that’s moved into the power plant-building business.

The speed at which the Sempra-First Solar project went online owes much to the fact that it was built on the site of an existing fossil fuel power plant. “It was already permitted for power generation, transmission existed and it did not have to go through the laborious California permitting process,” says Reese Tisdale, a solar analyst with Emerging Energy Research. “As such, First Solar was able to essentially plug and play.”

Nathaniel Bullard, a solar analyst with New Energy Finance, says he expects utilities increasingly to bet on smaller-scale photovoltaic farms to help meet state mandates to obtain a growing percentage of their electricity from renewable sources. Just this week, PG&E CEO Peter Darbee said his utility plans to invest in solar power plant projects rather than just buy the power they produce.

“I think a utility could easily integrate, technically and financially, 100 megawatts of PV,” Bullard says.  If something is falling behind on your big solar thermal projects, you can plug in PV. I think you’ll see more of this with California utilities and I expect to see it more in Florida and North Carolina. It’s a great runaround to issues of siting and transmission.”

That’s because in California photovoltaic power plants do not need approval from the California Energy Commission. And smaller-scale plants take up far less land and can be built close to existing transmission lines. Most large solar thermal power plants typically are planned for the Mojave Desert and require the construction of expensive power lines to connect them to the grid.

The modular nature of PV solar farms means they can begin generating electricity as each segment is completed while a solar thermal plant only goes online once the entire project is finished.

“Certainly there is a sweet spot in which the project is large enough to gain advantages of scale,” says Tisdale. “Also, these small-to-mid-size systems can be spread about a transmission network, instead of at one site.”

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Putting the big in Big Solar

Posted in alternative energy, Ausra, BrightSource Energy, endangered species, PG&E, renewable energy, solar energy, solar power plants, Solel, Southern California Edison, Stirling Energy Systems, tagged , , , , , , , , on July 10, 2008| 7 Comments »

Nearly three years ago, two Southern California utilities caused a stir when they announced deals to buy up to 1.75 gigawatts of electricity from massive solar farms to be built by Stirling Energy Systems of Phoenix. The company had developed a Stirling solar dish – a 38-foot-high, 40-foot-wide mirrored structure that looks like a big shiny satellite receiver. The dish focuses the sun’s rays on a Stirling engine, heating hydrogen gas to drive pistons that generate electricity.

Plans called for as many as 70,000 solar dishes to carpet the desert. For Southern California Edison (EIX) and San Diego Gas & Electric (SRE) – both facing a state mandate to obtain 20 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2010 – it was a big gamble. As the years ticked by and Stirling tinkered with its technology, competitors like Ausra, BrightSource Energy and Solel came out of stealth mode and stole the limelight, signing deals with PG&E (PCG) and filing applications with California regulators to build solar power plants. By the time I visited Stirling’s test site in New Mexico in March 2007 for a Business 2.0 feature story, industry insiders were telling me – privately, of course – that Stirling would never make it; Stirling dishes were just too complex and too expensive to compete against more traditional solar technologies.

That may or may not end up being true, but Stirling has moved to silence the naysayers by filing a license application with the California Energy Commission for its first solar power plant – the world’s largest – a 30,000-dish, 750-megawatt project to be built 100 miles east of San Diego on 6,100 acres of federal land controlled by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. (A energy commission licence application – an extremely detailed and expensive document; Stirling’s runs 2,600 pages – is considered a sign that a project has the wherewithal to move forward.)

The first phase of the SES Solar Two project will consist of 12,000 SunCatcher dishes generating 300 megawatts for San Diego Gas & Electric. While the Stirling solar dish is more complex and contains more moving parts than other solar thermal technologies – which use mirrors to heat liquids to generate steam to drive a standard electricity-generating turbine – or photovoltaic panels like those found on rooftops, it also offers some distinct advantages. For one thing, it’s the most efficient solar thermal technology, converting sunlight into electricity at a 31.25% rate.  Each 25-kilowatt dish is in fact a self-contained mini-power plant that can start generating electricity – and cash – as soon as it is installed. Stirling will build 1.5-megawatt clusters of 60 dishes that will begin paying for themselves as each pod goes online. A conventional solar thermal power plant, of course, must be completely built out – which can take a year or two depending on size – before generating electricity.

The 750-megawatt Stirling project will also use relatively little water – no small matter in the desert – compared to other solar thermal plants. According to Stirling, SES Solar Two will consume 33 acre-feet of water – to wash the dishs’ mirrors – which is equivalent to the annual water use of 33 Southern California households. In contrast, a solar power plant to be built by BrightSource Energy that is nearly half the size is projected to use 100 acre-feet of water annually while a 177-megawatt Ausra plant would use 22 acre-feet, according to the companies’ license applications.

Still, there’s some big hurdles for Stirling to overcome. While it did score a whopping $100 million in funding in April from Irish renewable energy company NTR, the company will need billions in project financing to build Solar Two. And the project’s second 450-megawatt phase is dependent on the utility completing a controversial new transmission line through the desert called the Sunrise Powerlink. Depending on how fast the project is approved, construction is expected to begin in 2009 and last more than three years.

The other big unknown is what environmental opposition may develop. Within 10 miles of the SES Solar Two site are proposals to build solar power plants on an additional 51,457 acres of BLM land. Then there are the wildlife issues. Several California-listed “species of special concern” have been found on the Stirling site, including the burrowing owl, flat-tailed horned lizard and the California horned lark.

Regardless it’s a big step forward for Stirling. As California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said in a statement, “This groundbreaking solar energy project is a perfect example of the clean renewable energy California can and will generate to meet our long-term energy and climate change goals.”

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Google-backed solar company scores big utility deal

Posted in alternative energy, Ausra, energy, environment, eSolar, renewable energy, solar energy, solar power plants, Southern California Edison, Stirling Energy Systems, tagged , , , , , , , on June 3, 2008| 5 Comments »

eSolar, the solar energy startup founded by Idealab’s Bill Gross and backed by Google, has signed a 20-year contract to supply utility Southern California Edison with 245 megawatts of green electricity.

The solar power plant will be built in 35-megawatt modules, with the first phase set to go online in 2011. As Green Wombat reported in April, eSolar scored $130 million in funding from Google.org, Google’s (GOOG) philanthropic arm, and other investors to develop solar thermal technology that Gross claims will produce electricity as cheaply as coal-fired power plants.

Like Ausra and BrightSource Energy – which have deals with PG&E (PCG) – eSolar will use fields of mirrors to heat water to create steam that drives electricity-generating turbines. Gross says that eSolar’s software allows the company to individually control smaller sun-tracking mirrors – called heliostats – which can be cheaply manufactured and which are more efficient and take up less land than conventional mirrors. According to Gross, that means eSolar can build modular power plants near urban areas and transmission lines rather than out in the desert, lowering costs.

eSolar’s cost claims got Southern California Edison’s (EIX) attention. “It was a competitively priced proposal,” Stuart Hemphill, the utility’s VP for renewable and alternative power, told Fortune. “We found the eSolar team very competent, motivated and willing to do a deal.”

“When it comes down to different solar technologies, competitive pricing is going to be an important part of the equation,” he adds. “They do offer a unique solution.”

eSolar is keeping mum about the exact location of the power plant, only saying it will be in the Antelope Valley region of Southern California.

One potential hitch: Getting eSolar’s electricity to Southern California Edison will depend on the construction of a major new transmission line. That line, the Tehachapi Renewable Transmission Project, has been partially approved to date.

With the eSolar deal, the utility is hedging its bets. Back in 2005, Southern California Edison signed a highly publicized deal with Phoenix’s Stirling Energy Systems to buy up to 850 megawatts of solar electricity from massive solar power plants to be built in the Mojave Desert. (Around the same time, San Diego Gas & Electric (SRE) signed a power purchase agreement with Stirling for up to 900 megawatts. ) Stirling is still perfecting its technology and has yet to file a license application for its first plant. But the company received a $100 million investment earlier this year and Hemphill says Stirling is moving forward.

“We expect that Stirling will meet its contractural obligations,” he says. “Solar thermal is definitely an emerging industry. It’s too early to tell which technologies will be the winners over the long run. It’s a time to be having a portfolio of different technologies so we can figure that out.”

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