written 1 October 2023
published 8 October 2023
Last week, red skies from wildfire smoke returned to Yellowknife, Alberta. Extended drought has lowered Mississippi river levels, allowing salt water to move inland, causing drinking water crisis in parts of Louisiana. Hail larger than baseballs fell again in central Texas. Heavy rain flooded Bangkok, Jacksonville, FL, and parts of New Jersey and New York City.
The climate crisis is real, and we need to stop adding more carbon to the atmosphere. This decarbonization goal requires three times as much electricity within 20 years, all non-carbon produced.
One of the issues with increasing power production is the limited transmission grid capacity, which occasionally has trouble dealing with peak loads at the existing levels. Expanding the grid capacity is expensive and very time consuming. However, if we can produce more of our power locally, we will need to import less.
In addition, with no major electrical power produced within our large county, and a diffuse population, much of the distribution system is vulnerable to wind damage and fire. People experience power outages resulting from events distant from them, some lasting for days. Increasing local power production will improve power resilience.
Of the various power sources available, solar is the most abundant locally, and becoming cheaper every year as mass production continues to scale up. The energy is free, it is only the hardware to collect it that costs. Installing a solar array is like prepaying for decades of electricity at a fixed cost, something no fossil fuel can deliver.
There are still issues. PG&E owns the entire transmission and distribution system, with the exception within the City of Ukiah. As a typical monopoly corporation, service to the customers is down the list of priorities. In addition, as more renewable projects are being built and requiring connection to the existing power grid, a backlog has been created. The bureaucratic structure of the State hinders this as well. Fortunately, powerful stakeholders are working to overcome these limitations.
PG&E has shifted their mission away from producing power to primarily shipping power, and has little interest in making production investments locally. Sonoma Clean Power services the majority of the county, contracting for renewable power from providers, which is then shipped to customers over the PG&E system. But SCP doesn't have the staff or budget to build production systems.
Even though costs have plummeted over time, now only a few dollars per installed watt, an array is a big expense, particularly when we think in terms of what the community needs (megawatts) rather than just a single household (kilowatts). The good news is that a utility scale array is reliably profitable over time, and companies are now in the business of installing and operating this type of power system.
In 2022 alone, 2,500MW of utility scale solar was installed in California, bringing the total for the State to 38,000MW. Of this, at least four sites are over 500MW each. Another 27,000MW are planned over the next 5 years.
Over an annual average, Mendocino county now consumes about 1,500 megawatt hours of electricity every day. A single 400MW array, located within Mendocino county, would double our power, but a single array would be problematic, requiring connection to the high voltage transmission grid, and wouldn't really relieve local power resilience concerns. A more versatile alternative would be a hundred 4MW arrays, distributed around the county. Over a decade, this works out to about one a month.
Renewable Properties (www.renewprop.com) is a company that builds and operates distributed generation solar systems. They have successfully built systems within PG&E territory and are now developing two local arrays, near Ukiah and Laytonville. Sonoma Clean Power is negotiating to buy the power when production starts in late 2025. Renewable Properties (RP) has at least one more Mendocino county site in process, and is interested in finding more.
RP is willing to buy or lease land. They need 5 acres per megawatt of array, and are looking for parcels at least 20 acres in size, on up. Their projects connect into the lower voltage distribution system that you see running along roads, and they need sites within 500' of that system. If interested, contact Dakin Spain (dakin@renewprop.com), their Senior Project Developer.
We who live in Mendocino county have on the ground knowledge. Start thinking about where an array could be installed. Talk to friends. Which land owners would be willing to help power our communities?
