PG&E bulks up its solar power portfolio

San Francisco utility Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E ) has announced plans to purchase an average of 592 gigawatt-hours of electricity annually from a 230-megawatt utility-scale solar power project being developed by NextLight Renewable Power, a startup that is also based in San Francisco.

The project, formally known as the AV Solar Ranch, will be built on agricultural land in Los Angeles County’s Antelope Valley and will use photovoltaic panels and inverters to capture solar energy and convert it to electricity. Dow Jones Newswires reports that the electricity price in the 25-year power purchase agreement  linking PG&E and NextLight is caped at $132.90/megawatt-hour. At this rate, NextLight would earn about $78 million per year.

The plant is expected to begin delivering electricity to PG&E in 2011 and become fully operational by 2013.

With a California state mandate requiring local utilities produce 33% of their electricity from carbon-free, clean energy sources by 2030, PG&E and the state’s other major utilities (Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric) are aggressively securing clean power from a slew of independent developers. Just  last month PG&E signed contracts for seven utility-scale solar power plants with a total capacity of 1,310 megawatts being developed by Google-backed BrightSource Energy.
A recent report by the Solar Electric Power Association (SEPA), a Washington industry group, ranked California as the nation’s most solar-integrated state. For more on that see, here.

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