If it weren't for the progressiveness of California, the rest of the country would never think about electric/hybrid cars, banning smoking in restaurants/bars and now forcing electric companies to generate 20% of their power from renewable resources.
This just shows why many industries must continue to be strictly regulated and progressive ideas must be mandated by government. Our lives are better for these “forced” advancements.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/15/bu...nterstitial?hp
Two California companies said Thursday that they would each build
solar power plants that were 10 times bigger than the largest now in service, creating the first true utility-scale use of a technology now mostly confined to rooftop supplements to conventional power supplies.
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The solar power will be sold to Pacific Gas and Electric, which is under a state mandate to get 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2010. The utility said that it expected the plants, both using photovoltaic technology, which turns sunlight directly into electricity, would be competitive with other renewable sources, including wind and solar thermal, which uses the sun’s heat to boil water.
Solar power is more costly than wind, watt for watt, experts say, but delivers the energy at a time of day when electricity prices are higher and is more valuable even if it is more costly.
OptiSolar, a company that has just begun to make thin-film solar panels — with a layer of semiconductor material thinner than a human hair on the back of a glass panel — will install 550 megawatts in San Luis Obispo County, in central California. And the SunPower Corporation, which uses crystalline cells, will build 250 megawatts in the same county. The OptiSolar plant will cover about nine square miles and the SunPower plant about 3.5, although the actual cell area will be smaller.
They will total 800 megawatts. A megawatt is enough power to run a large Wal-Mart. At peak hours, together the plants will produce as much power as a large coal plant or a small nuclear reactor. But they will run far fewer hours of the year so output will be at least a third less than that of a coal plant of the same size.
The scale of the California announcement makes it “pretty significant,” said Robert J. Thormeyer, a spokesman for the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, whose members sit on the state public utility commissions.
But such developments are only possible in states that have ambitious quotas for renewable power and have good sun, he said. “It’s hard to say if it’s something we’ll see replicated in other states,” he said. But “it opens up a door.”
The chairman of SunPower, Thomas H. Werner, said the 250 megawatts that his company would build was as much solar photovoltaic capacity as was installed worldwide last year.
At OptiSolar, the chief executive, Randy Goldstein, said, “There is really no point in doing this on small scale.”
“If you’re going to make a difference, you’ve got to do it big,” Mr. Goldstein said in a telephone interview.
The largest current installation in the United States is at Nellis Air Force Base, in Nevada, with 14 megawatts, also built by SunPower. Spain has one completed plant at 23 megawatts. A German company, Juwi, has a 40-megawatt installation east of Leipzig. Florida Power and Light recently ordered a 25-megawatt plant.
Solar energy, both photovoltaic and thermal, which uses the sun’s heat to make steam, is bounding ahead, driven mostly by state quotas. California requires that 20 percent of the kilowatt-hours sold by investor-owned utilities come from renewable sources by 2010, a goal that some companies are struggling to meet. Pacific Gas and Electric expects that when these two solar plants are completed, its total will rise to 24 percent, but that will not be until 2013.
Both plants would require a variety of permits.
The planned California installations raise questions about the idea that solar power is best deployed on the roofs of houses and businesses. Although they can help avoid transmission expenses when built near load, the companies said that by building on a gargantuan scale, they expected to achieve economies of scale in the cost of design, installation and connection to the grid, as well as marketing and overhead. A typical home installation is several thousandths of a megawatt, while these are in the hundreds of megawatts.
The prices are not clear. The companies said their contracts did not allow them to talk about the price, and a spokeswoman for Pacific Gas and Electric said her company was trying to obtain the best possible deal for its ratepayers by not disclosing the contracts and not telling other suppliers of renewable energy what it was willing to pay.
According to the California Energy Commission, last year the price of power from a solar photovoltaic installation was 70.5 cents a kilowatt-hour, roughly six times the national average retail rate for residential power. But both OptiSolar and SunPower said their costs were much lower.
SunPower’s panels are mounted at a 20-degree angle, facing south, and pivot over the course of the day, so they face the sun. OptiSolar’s panels are installed at a fixed angle. They are larger and less efficient, but much less costly, so that the cost per watt of energy is similar, company executives said.
Both are good at producing power at the time of day when prices tend to be high, in the afternoon.
Neither approaches the economy of fossil-fuel burning plants, said Jennifer Zerwer, a spokeswoman for Pacific Gas and Electric. But they are competitive with wind power and with power from solar thermal plants.
And prices will eventually fall, she said.
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