Georgia Power announced the results of its 2014 solar solicitation.
In April, Georgia Power asked for bids for 495 megawatts of solar capacity ... and just announced that they are contracting for 515.
The 'Big Deal', not just to me, in this announcement:
the average power price in the four PPAs with projects of less than 20 MW each was "less than 6.5 cents/kWh -- 2 cents below the cost achieved through the [utility's] 2013 solicitation" for solar power
Revisit the key points ...
- "the average power price is "less than 6.5 cents per kilowatt hour"!
- 2 cents -- nearly 25 percent -- below the 2013 costs
Yet another signpost on the solar revolution.
To provide a context, according to the Solar Energy Industry Association (SEIA), Georgia has 138 megawatts of currently installed solar systems -- this deal alone will quadruple that number.
Let's be clear, Georgia Power is far from alone in seeing significantly falling solar prices:
A report by the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory says the cost of energy sold to utilities from large-scale solar power operations has fallen by more than 70 percent since 2008.
"This marked the fourth consecutive year of significant price reductions for residential and commercial systems in the U.S.," Galen Barbose, one of the report's authors, said in a statement.
There might be a reason why 53% of the faceplate capacity added to the electrical grid in the first half of 2014 came from solar ...
NOTE: Capacity is a confusing figure for many. The "capacity" is the total theoretical maximum output. Solar power delivers roughly 20% of the capacity figure. Thus, the 515 megawatts of capacity Georgia Power is contracting for equates to roughly 103 megawatts of constant power (remember, of course, that the solar power is not constant -- and will deliver maximum production aligned with peak hour demands (afternoon cooling in the summer)).
6:09 AM PT: And, on the wind front, something shared by a correspondent:
Along with that great news, new onshore wind technology shows the wind potential in the Southeastern U.S. is HUGE:
http://blog.cleanenergy.org/...
Modern wind turbines make wind energy economically feasible in more areas across the Southeast. Now with access to winds at greater heights, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee each contain more than 25,000 megawatts (MW) of wind energy potential, and a total estimated 134,000 MW of wind potential now exists within the Southern region. To put that number into perspective, that’s about half as much of the total installed electric utility capacity in the Southeast!
This advancement in technology has led to lower costs for wind power. Wind energy is now one of the least expensive sources of new power generation in the country. Costs have declined by 39% over the past decade for wind speed areas averaging 6 meters per second (13.4 miles per hour), which applies to many areas in the Southeast.
6:55 AM PT: Just got a note that SEIA published "Solar means Business: http://www.seia.org/... This looks at which and why businesses are deploying solar.