Commercial solar power strategically sited in San Diego

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More and more, solar power and solar power plus storage is being seen and deployed as a way to assist in the reliable operation of the electric grid. As the large majority of power outages are a result of power lines being damaged, and the technology and predictability of solar+storage keeps increasing – we’re finding that strategically distributing distributed generation resources (DER) has unique advantages.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) is coming together with the City of San Diego, non-profit Clean Coalition, and San Diego Gas & Electric (SD&E) to determine a city-wide plan for distributed solar plus energy storage with a purpose of increasing the city’s electricity grid affordability, reliability and resilience. The San Diego program is part of a broader set of NREL projects known as the Solar Energy Innovation Network.

The first part of the program is to a Solar Siting Survey. Clean Coalition has done these before in California – East Bay, Peninsula Advanced, and a Southern Cal Edison Preferred Pilot. These analyses have suggested strategic locations to site 650 MW, 65 MW and 160 MW of solar power.

Clean Coalition aims to identify ‘viable solar siting opportunities across the urban and suburban environments, but also evaluates those opportunities based on the interconnection potential of the local grid for each identified site.’ After determining the individual locations, Clean Coalition will also design a feed-in-tariff program to drive development of solar power in those locations.

The broader goal is to build a smarter power grid, and planning in advance to use solar+storage seems to make a lot of sense. We have recently seen significant broad savings – $2.6 billion in the transmission and distribution networks of California alone – in using distributed energy. New York City is now paying extra for solar power and energy storage located in high density downtown areas, and Massachusetts determined that a structure similar to a feed-in tariff has great potential to drive the next 1.6 GW of solar power across the state in their SMART program.

And now, we’re seeing San Diego smartly looking to connect with local business to get private money – combined with strategic research and funding – to support broader societal needs of safety and savings.

These projects demonstrate that distributed generation from solar power has more to offer the population than just a cheap, clean, renewable power grid – the source also offers safety and consistency.

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