Dive Brief:
- Southern California Edison (SCE) announced last week that it has signed power purchasing agreements (PPA) for 1,314 MW of new solar PV capacity and renewed its contract for 225 MW of geothermal capacity.
- All the solar capacity will come from seven projects that are expected to come online in 2019-2020. Recurrent Energy, 8minutenergy Renewables, Copper Mountain Solar 4, Tribal Solar, Silver Ridge Power and Panoche Valley Solar are the vendors for these projects.
- The 225 MW of geothermal capacity will come from an existing Geysers Power geothermal project.
Dive Insight:
These PPAs will help SCE meet California's 33% renewables by 2020 portfolio standard. 22% of the power delivered by SCE was renewables in 2013.
The geothermal capacity counts towards the state renewables target, but it can also help reduce the integration costs of solar and thus make SCE's solar contracts more attractive.
“The [levelized cost of electricity] for geothermal is competitive if you include the integration costs of intermittent renewables because geothermal is a base load resource without integration costs," Carl Stills, energy manager at Imperial Irrigation District, the sixth-largest utility in California, recently told Utility Dive.
With integration costs, the solar price “is somewhere in the $93 per megawatt-hour to $103 per megawatt-hour range,” he added. Geothermal prices are “anywhere from $80 to $110.”