San Diego city, utility, and cleantech industry officials are gathering at UC San Diego this morning to announce a 25-year contract that San Diego Gas & Electric has signed with Tenaska Solar Ventures for 150 megawatts from a solar plant to be developed east of San Diego, near El Centro, CA. As part of the deal, the company supplying the concentrating solar panels for the 1,057-acre desert facility is planning to build a factory in San Diego, creating an estimated 450 local jobs. In a media notice sent yesterday, SDG&E says construction of the desert solar facility will lead to an additional 300 construction jobs during construction, currently set from 2013 to 2015. Concentrix Solar will make the concentrating solar panels in San Diego. The company is a subsidiary of Soitec, the semiconductor and photovoltaic cell manufacturer based in Bernin, France.
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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