CA Utility Misses 37% Renewable Target as Geothermal Firm Faces Financing Woes

April 26th, 2011 by Susan Kraemer

Riverside Public Utilities is the 8th largest electric power utility in California, serving 107,000 customers. Like its bigger cousins in the sunshine state, it is aggressively pursuing renewable energy targets. But its high goal is threatened by the collapse of financing for a geothermal project it signed a contract for – that would have raised the supply of its renewable energy to 37%.

While the other state utilities plan to meet the 33% target by 2020, it has plans to be 50% renewable by then. But it has just had an obstacle to meeting its next target, according to Leora Broydo Vestel at Energy Prospects.

In 2008 it signed a contract for a 30-year power-purchase agreement with tribally owned Shoshone Renaissance for the energy from a 46 MW geothermal project to be built in Utah. But the company has been unable to secure financing for the project. The power was to have been supplied at a very competitive $77 per megawatt hour.

The utility expected that the first 32-MW phase of the project would be complete and producing energy in early 2010, with the second 32-MW unit coming on line a year later, but as the company had difficulties in finding financing, the size of the project was scaled back to 46 MW.

The Riverside Board of Public Utilities recently approved the termination of the PPA for failure by Shoshone Renaissance to meet milestones set forth in the contract.

So Riverside Public Utilities remains – for now – with its current level of renewable energy. It currently gets just over the typical (because it was mandated) Californian utility rate of 20% renewable energy – although it counts hydro-electric power towards that goal: the big utilities are not allowed to include hydro as a renewable source.

Geothermal Firm Offers First Pay-by-the-Kilowatt-Hour Plan (cleantechnica.com)
DOE Invests in Greenfire’s CCS that Makes Geothermal Cheaper (cleantechnica.com)
Pike Research forecasts geothermal power capacity could more than double by 2020 under aggressive investment scenario (greencarcongress.com)

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Tags: Power Purchase Agreement, Southern CAlifornia

About the Author

Susan Kraemer writes at CleanTechnica, CSP-Today, PV-Insider , SmartGridUpdate, and GreenProphet. She has also been published at Ecoseed, NRDC OnEarth, MatterNetwork, Celsius, EnergyNow, and Scientific American. As a former serial entrepreneur in product design, Susan brings an innovator's perspective on inventing a carbon-constrained civilization: If necessity is the mother of invention, solving climate change is the mother of all necessities! As a lover of history and sci-fi, she enjoys chronicling the strange future we are creating in these interesting times. Follow Susan on Twitter @dotcommodity.

http://www.bes.co.uk plumbing

One of the biggest problems facing our current energy sources is that they are not renewable and will eventually run out. As more societies develop across the world, the need for power increases. Coal or oil aren’t renewable and the use of these sources create air pollution with harmful emissions. However, alternative energy sources like solar and wind power will last as long as the sun shines and the wind blows.
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Renewable energy is becoming more popular these days. This is a great thing because these resources are unlimited and clean. It will be beneficial for the environment, especially to the future generations.
Anonymous

There must be an interesting story behind this story.

The project had a 30 year contract to sell its power. The market was secure. The price was fixed, one would assume at a profitable level. The resource must have been there for things to go as far as they did.

Wonder why the financing fell through?