sPower, working collaboratively with MCE, announced that they recently achieved commercial operations on a 130 MWDC solar project in Lancaster, California. The project named Antelope Expansion 2 was completed by sPower in December of 2018 and will sell output to MCE under a long-term Power Purchase Agreement. While California is home to many large solar projects, this is the largest one completed to date in California with a Community Choice Aggregator (CCA). CCAs broaden the potential for renewables by allowing cities and counties to bring customers together to leverage individual purchasing power within a defined jurisdiction.
Antelope Expansion 2 is the second solar facility where sPower and MCE have partnered to bring more solar online. While under construction, this project provided meaningful economic benefits locally in the over 261,000 union labor hours worked from the Southern California Trade Unions, including Laborers Local 300, Operators Local 12, Ironworkers Local 433 & 416 and IBEW Local 11.
“MCE is proud to partner with sPower and unions to continue supporting the green jobs and renewable energy projects that will both bolster local communities and evolve into the cornerstone of the state’s new economy,” said Dawn Weisz, CEO of MCE. “Projects like this demonstrate MCE’s mission to offer the 60 to 100% renewable energy options that helped MCE customers meet California’s SB 100 renewable energy targets 11 years ahead of schedule.”
“The project is indicative of the trend of CCAs taking a leadership position in renewable procurement within California,” said Hans Isern, sPower’s senior VP of origination. “CCAs are giving electric customers in California the ability to select a cleaner source of power from in-state projects, which also helps provide more opportunities for local businesses, labor unions, and communities within the state.”
News item from sPower
Solarman says
The CCA’s have begun to take some of the business from the two largest utilities in California. SCE and the newly bankrupt PG&E. The 500 pound gorilla in the room will always be the inefficiency of the “standard” electric utility business model. Commodity fueled centralized generation with a transmission system that has 3% power loss for (every) transformer in the grid that steps up or steps down voltage for end user use. The fueled generation plants can lose from 70% to 80% of the input fuel BTUs, just getting the “generated product” to the ratepayer. For solar PV, it is best and more efficient than the grid when installed and used on the home or business the power is needed. Energy storage will make the solar PV system even more cost effective over time.
There is a movement now in the housing development marketplace for high efficiency homes with solar PV installed as part of the complete project. These high efficiency solar PV powered homes have energy storage as part of the system. I recently was able to look at such a housing tract in Clarksdale Arizona. This solar community has (just) 1.2KW peak of solar PV panels on the roof of the home and a 10KW Sonnen battery storage system, powering the house for most of the time. It seems the system does both solar PV storage and “off peak” energy storage from the grid at night. This so called “arbitrage” is useful in using the system components in a more efficient manner than just stand alone grid tied solar PV systems. It will be interesting to see how the (CCAs) fare against direct, distributed power generation with energy storage from the residential owners. The CCAs actually seem to be designed to become “absorbed” by the community or the distributed generation with energy storage could be “absorbed” by the CCA.