by Andrew C. Revkin
New
York Times
11 February 2009
The
largest utility in California, squeezed by rising demand for
electricity and looming state deadlines to curb fossil fuels, has
signed a deal to buy solar power from seven immense arrays of
mirrors, towers and turbines to be installed in the Mojave Desert.
The
contracts amount to the world’s largest single deal for new
solar energy capacity, said officials from the utility, Southern
California Edison, and BrightSource Energy, the company that would
build and run the plants. When fully built, the solar arrays on a
sunny day would supply 1,300 megawatts of electricity, somewhat
more than a modern nuclear power plant.
That is
enough electricity to power about 845,000 homes.
The
companies acknowledged that several hurdles would have to be
surmounted before the first surge of electricity flows from the
desert — in theory around 2013 — toward power-hungry cities
more than 200 miles away.
First is
approval by the state Public Utilities Commission. But more
challenging, they said, is a series of permits for improving
transmission lines. That process in the past has taken seven to 10
years per project, said Stuart R. Hemphill, vice president for
renewable and alternative power for the utility.
“The
reality is that renewable projects are very far away from where
customers are,” Mr. Hemphill said. “The key is to have
transmission built.”
He said
he was confident the solar project would succeed, and emphasized
that it was part of the company’s accelerating shift toward new
energy sources, including recent large contracts for wind
turbines, photovoltaic rooftop panels and geothermal power. “What
we’re doing is changing the shape of the way the electric system
is going to operate in California,” he said.
BrightSource,
with investors as varied as Google and the VantagePoint venture
capital firm — and with advisers that include the environmental
campaigner and lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — has refined a
decades-old technology. Thousands of small mirrors focus intense
desert sunlight on a central tower, where it generates steam to
drive a turbine.
Officials
from the utility and plant builder said the cost of the plants and
the electricity they will produce could not be disclosed under
California law.
The deal
is one of many signs that concentrated solar power, after decades
of ups and downs, is finding an important place around the world,
said Severin Borenstein, a specialist in energy policy at the Haas
School of Business of the University of California, Berkeley.
But the
technology remains substantially more expensive than coal as an
electricity source, Mr. Borenstein said, and further expansion
will depend on whether the public continues to support renewable
mandates or a rising price on emissions from coal burning. “Everybody’s
for reducing greenhouse gases until you start having to pay for
it,” he said.
California
is imposing one of the country’s most aggressive renewable-power
mandates on its utilities. Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas
and Electric and other providers are racing to meet a deadline of
having at least 20 percent of electricity flowing from renewable
sources by the end of 2010.
Vanessa
McGrady, a spokeswoman for Southern California Edison, said the
utility now gets 16 percent of its electricity from renewable
sources.
Even with
the new plants and other nonpolluting energy options, the state
still faces big energy and emissions challenges, given relentless
growth in demand for electricity at peak times.
In 2008,
Pacific Gas and Electric, in Northern California, entered
agreements to buy nearly 900 megawatts of power from BrightSource
of Oakland, Calif. BrightSource has installed a pilot plant in the
Negev Desert of Israel.
Other
designs for plants that concentrate sunlight to generate power are
in operation or under development in Spain, the Middle East, north
Africa, and elsewhere in the Southwest.
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