Canadian Solar Inc., one of the global solar power companies, announced on January 27th it was selected by BELECTRIC Inc. to power four new solar power projects, totaling 7.8 MW, in San Bernadino County, Southern California.
The projects (Otoe Solar, Navajo Solar and Powatan Solar in Apple Valley and Industry Solar in Adelanto) are part of Southern California Edison's (SCE) California Renewable Energy Small Tariff (CREST) feed-in tariff program, which is aimed at developing smaller scale utility power plants to provide distributed sources of clean energy.
"BELECTRIC is excited to be one of the first companies to successfully complete a SCE CREST project," said Dr. Karl Markert, CEO of BELECTRIC Inc. "We were approached in early 2013 with the four projects that needed to be completed before their CREST Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) expired at year end. It was our relationships with SCE, San Bernardino County, and leading solar power companies, like Canadian Solar that greatly assisted us in meeting very tight project schedules. Our in-house development, engineering and construction team built on these relationships and rose to the challenge to permit, design, build, and commission the projects in record time."
BELECTRIC utilized 6,480 Canadian Solar CS6X 300W MaxPower Polycrystalline modules on each project totaling 25,920 modules. At the peak of construction, 250 jobs were created, mainly through hiring local subcontractors. The projects will eliminate 10,290 metric tons of CO2, the equivalent to removing 1,375 automobiles from the road or planting 454,000 trees.
"We are pleased to have been selected by BELECTRIC to power these four solar power projects. Smaller scale utility power plants represent a sizeable opportunity for us, especially in regions being actively developed, like Southern California. The fact that we have demonstrated our strength as a partner on much larger projects gives us a competitive advantage in pursuing these new opportunities," said Dr. Shawn Qu, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Canadian Solar Incorporated.
All four installations were commissioned on December 28, 2013. BELECTRIC sold the operational projects to Sustainable Power Group LLC.