The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) last week approved a power purchase agreement that would allow Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E)(NYSE: PCG) to purchase electricity produced by solar panels to be placed in orbit around the earth.
The agreement is with Solaren Corp., a company that has an ambitious plan for completing a space-based solar power plant in 2016.
Energy produced by orbiting solar panels would be converted to radio-frequency energy for transmission to a receiving station in California. There the energy would be converted to electricity and added to the power grid.
Space-based solar power has been researched in the U.S. for several
decades and this summer the Japanese government announced plans to
pursue a space-based solar program.
PG&E has agreed to buy 200 megawatts of power through a 15-year power purchase agreement.
While an experimental project is unique for the state’s Renewables Portfolio Standard program, the CPUC said it approved the agreement because it is consistent with the state’s objective of increasing its reliance on a diverse supply of renewable energy resources and of supporting renewable technologies at reasonable costs and risks to ratepayers.
“At the conceptual level, the advantages of space-based systems are significant,” said Michael Peevey, president of the CPUC, as reported by The New York Times. “This technology would offer around-the-clock access to clean renewable energy, and while there’s no doubt this project has many hurdles to overcome, both regulatory and technological, it’s hard to argue with the audacity of the project.”
Solaren is an eight-year-old company based in Manhattan Beach, California. The company projects commercial operations beginning in 2016.
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