Peninsula Clean Energy (PCE) has signed a 15-year solar-plus-storage purchase agreement involving Leeward Renewable Energy’s planned 102-megawatt (MW) Chaparral Solar Facility in Kern County.
Construction on the Chaparral project is set to begin this December and delivery of energy to PCE is slated to start December 2023. The project is expected to deliver enough energy to meet about 8 percent of PCE’s energy needs, according to PCE. Founded in 2016, PCE is a nonprofit Community Choice Aggregation agency providing 295,000 San Mateo County customers with carbon-free electricity. The agreement with Leeward marks the ninth longterm contract PCE has signed with renewable energy providers, including those producing solar, geothermal, wind, and hydro. The eight previous longterm contracts account for about 34.5 percent of PCE’s clean energy load.
The Leeward agreement is PCE’s first solar-plus-storage agreement.
“Pairing solar with energy storage allows the project to shift power delivery from the middle of the day to the evening peak when it is needed,” according to PCE.
The Chaparral facility will be owned and operated by Leeward. Under the contract, PCE “will pay for the output of the solar generating portion of the project at a fixed-price rate per MWh and will pay for the use of the storage portion of the project at a fixed-price rate per kW-month, both with no escalation, for the full term of the contract (15 years),” according to the nonprofit.
“While we continue to elevate the amount of solar, wind, geothermal and other clean generation, the storage capacity of this agreement is vital to ensuring we are getting closer to our ultimate goal of providing 24/7 emission-free renewable power to our customers by 2025,” said PCE CEO Jan Pepper.
