San Diego Gas & Electric has added two more 25-year contracts with French-based Soitec, which will supply a total of 125 megawatts from solar energy sites using Soitec’s Concentrix CPV (Concentrating Photo-Voltaic solar panel modules.
In a statement today, the two companies say Soitec Solar Development will manufacture the modules in a new factory to be built in San Diego. The two local agreements follow three previous contracts for 30 megawatts of CPV-generated solar power. All five local projects, with a combined total of 155 megawatts, will be built in San Diego County near SDG&E electric substations. The California Public Utilities Commission still must approve the proposed power contracts.
As I reported last month, Soitec also has been working with Tenaska Solar Ventures to develop a 150-megawatt solar plant in the desert east of San Diego. The French semiconductor manufacturer says its concentrating photovoltatic technology converts sunlight into electric power at better than 37 percent efficiency for direct current, or at roughly 25 percent for alternating current.
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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