San Francisco, California-based Recurrent Energy recently announced it has signed power purchase agreements, or PPAs, with one of the state’s biggest utilities, Southern California Edison, to buy all the power from three solar power systems Recurrent plans to construct in San Bernardino and Fresno counties.
Privately held Recurrent Energy is an independent power producer heavily invested in distributed solar energy projects in the utility-scale range; that is, one megawatt or greater. Recurrent, which in late 2009 launched itself into the European renewable energy landscape with 4.8 megawatts of rooftop solar in Spain, was also the premier solar entity in the 5-megawatt public/private partnership solar installation at the Sunset Reservoir, a municipal reservoir operated by the City of San Francisco. This project, one of the largest municipal solar photovoltaic projects in the nation, saw its entire electrical output purchased by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.
In Recurrent’s newest solar venture, a project “distributed” across three locations, the combined output of 50 megawatts will be ready to feed into the grid by the spring of 2013, and is – according to Recurrent CEO Arno Harris (whose blog is available online) – a prime example of the ability of distributed-scale solar to deliver “significant quantities of power on relatively short timeframes.”
To put this newest project in perspective, Harris writes, it’s important to note that the PPA represents 10 times the capacity of the Sunset Reservoir project, and also reflects Recurrent’s distributed approach to developing and marketing solar power in California.
The three newest Recurrent projects – two in Kern County, at 6 and 22 megawatts each, and one in San Bernardino County, at 22 megawatts – are located on private land leased by Recurrent Energy. This eliminates the need for environmental reviews and a lot of the squabbling and delays associated with truly mega-scale solar projects located on public lands, for example in the Mojave Desert, where critical habitat for the desert tortoise conflicts with the need for cleaner, renewable power in the form of solar energy.
According to Harris, lining up the PPAs for this latest project was a huge validation for Recurrent’s focus on distributed-scale solar projects, and its insistence on building these arrays where they are needed most.
Harris admits it was also a “sweet personal moment” for himself, reaffirming his goal of making solar energy a part of the mainstream energy mix. Harris, who got into solar nine years ago, when the largest solar projects were still measured in kilowatts rather than megawatts, says this latest round of power purchase agreements is made even better by knowing that his company, Recurrent – which already has more than 1 gigawatt of projects on its slate – has a lot more megawatts in the pipeline.
The deal is also beneficial to SCE, a unit of Edison International, which must act in concert with the state’s renewable energy mandate, which dictates that for-profit utilities get a third of their power from renewable sources like solar by 2020.
SCE, whose generation mix (2009) is largely natural gas, with some nuclear and 17 percent renewables, uses only 7 percent coal to make electricity, so its profile is already pretty green. The addition of solar energy can only help that profile as the nation approaches some form of regulation of greenhouse gas emissions like carbon dioxide, either through cap-and-trade or emissions certificates, either of which will seriously impact the financial viability of utilities and energy companies in the future.