BrightSource Gains Big Solar Customer

By REBECCA SMITH

Closely held BrightSource Energy Inc. has agreed to a deal with Edison International's Southern California Edison Co. to supply the utility with 1,300 megawatts of desert solar power, a potentially large sum of electricity, but one that comes too late to help the utility achieve a state goal of obtaining 20% of energy from renewable resources by late 2010.
Under the contract announced Wednesday, a series of 100- and 200-megawatt solar plants would be built between 2013 and 2016, assuming the projects win federal and state approvals and are supported by transmission upgrades.
BrightSource intends to solicit funding later this year and, if successful, would begin construction shortly thereafter on thermal-solar installations in arid regions of Southern California. Each would concentrate the sun's heat, with the help of motor-driven mirrors, to make electricity. A total of 10,500 acres is needed.
BrightSource intends to add the first solar tower to a site on which it already is building a 400-megawatt solar array for PG&E Corp.'s Pacific Gas and Electric Co. utility in the high desert Ivanpah Valley, on the California-Nevada border in eastern San Bernadino County. Water use could become an issue, although solar energy requires little water compared with fossil-fuel plants.
No estimate of the total project cost was released, or the price that Edison has agreed to pay for each unit of electricity. But the partners said the cost to utility customers will be less than what it would cost to procure a similar amount of electricity from newly built gas-fired generating plants, the state's gauge of reasonableness.
Currently, Edison gets about 16% of its electricity from renewable resources, excluding large hydroelectric dams, the most of any of California's four big utilities. Los Angeles voters, who get most of their electricity from a city-owned utility that has lagged in the switch to renewables, will have an opportunity on March 3 to vote on a ballot measure that would require the utility to get 400 megawatts of solar power by 2014.
California, like other states, is trying to boost its renewable resources to reduce fuel costs, slash carbon-dioxide emissions, cut energy-industry use of precious water and stimulate job creation.
John Woolard, chief executive of BrightSource, said his company may seek federal incentives, including a possible 30% tax credit for manufacturing facilities, if the provision makes it way into a conference report on the stimulus package.
Write to Rebecca Smith at rebecca.smith@wsj.com