Recurrent Energy made a really exciting announcement today. We revealed we recently signed three power purchase agreements (PPAs) with Southern California Edison (SCE) for a combined total of 50WM of solar capacity.
A rendering of one of the projects is shown above and gives a sense of the scale of what we're doing. For perspective, the PPAs we're announcing represent 10 times the capacity of our SFPUC project that garnered a fair amount of attention last year.
Recurrent Energy will build and operate the solar power systems, located in Kern County and San Bernardino County and are expected to go into construction in 2012. Under the terms of the PPAs, SCE will buy the 100% of the power generated by the systems.
It's great to finally be able to share some of the details of the development work we've been doing over the last year and a half. With this announcement, we're demonstrating that we've successfully marketed power from three of our projects in our California portfolio.
It's also a huge validation of our strategic focus on distributed scale solar. We've been making the case that distributed-scale solar (2-20MW solar projects connected to the existing grid) can be permitted and interconnected faster than large-scale projects. What this announcement shows is that there is demand for this kind of asset and that 'small' distributed-scale projects can be aggregated together to deliver significant amounts of power.
And finally it's a sweet personal moment for me. I got into solar nine years ago when a 'large' project was still measured in kilowatts. My goal was to help play a part in bringing the solar industry to scale and making solar PV a meaningful part of the mainstream generating mix. With today's announcement I can finally say that moment has arrived--what's even sweeter is there is so much more in our pipeline to come!
Congrats, Arno. This is a great achievement for Recurrent and for the entire DG industry!
Posted by: Ted Rose, NexGen Energy Partners LLC | 02 February 2010 at 11:03 AM