Early last year, California utility San Diego Gas & Electric launched a community microgrid project, meant not only to boost the state’s adoption of energy storage, but to serve as the next step in its wildfire prevention efforts — an increasingly important part of the utility mission in a state ravaged by wildfires. But in recent […]
Canadian Solar subsidiary Recurrent Energy has sold its remaining equity stake in the 100-megawatt Mustang solar project, a key resource for California’s flagship community-choice aggregators, to the Renewable Power Group of Goldman Sachs Asset Management. Thursday’s deal completes Recurrent’s sale of equity stakes in the 973 megawatts of solar it brought online in 2016 in California. Financial […]
The community-choice aggregators disrupting California’s electricity market have come a long way in a short time, and the credit rating agencies are taking notice. Peninsula Clean Energy, which procures electricity for around 300,000 accounts in the San Francisco Bay Area, obtained an investment-grade credit rating this week from Moody’s, along with a stable outlook. It’s the […]
What started as a routine gas plant procurement ended as a testament to the changing electrical grid. This week, utility Southern California Edison selected a roster of energy storage projects to supply local capacity needs around the coastal city of Oxnard, instead of the 262-megawatt natural-gas peaker plant it had chosen previously. If regulators give their approval, […]
The California Public Utilities Commission has approved two sweeping programs in recent years to spur community solar construction in the state, but the market has yet to gain real traction. Solar developers are now scrambling to organize projects as these programs advance and new opportunities crop up. “There is not a community solar market yet, but […]
The U.S. Department of Energy’s innovation arm wants to disrupt floating offshore wind turbine technology. On February 1, the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) announced it was making available $28 million in funding for research projects to develop new technologies for floating offshore wind turbines. The funding opportunity falls under a new ARPA-E program called ATLANTIS (Aerodynamic Turbines, Lighter […]
Former California Senator Kevin de León is back in campaign mode after announcing this month he will vie for a city council seat in Los Angeles, and is continuing to center environmental issues among his core policy interests. Speaking at a University of California-Berkeley energy summit on Friday, de León expounded on environmental racism and […]
Almost as soon as Pacific Gas & Electric announced that it was saddled with liability from several deadly wildfires and would be filing for bankruptcy, San Francisco Mayor London Breed directed the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission to look at taking local control of power distribution. On January 29, PG&E, California’s largest utility, officially filed for […]
California officials grappling with the fallout from devastating wildfires and the fate of embattled utility Pacific Gas & Electric will soon have to answer another weighty question: Should the state’s utilities get out of the business of buying and selling electricity? And, if so, what should be the default electricity provider for customers who opt […]
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