Gemini Solar Pushing Ahead In Austin Sunshine
Austin could get one of the biggest solar photovoltaic plants in the country if a deal is approved between Gemini Solar Development and the city-owned Austin Energy. But the planned 30-megawatt project comes as some companies are scaling back their sun-powered operations and laying off staff, so how can San Francisco-based Gemini Solar keep the momentum going?
Although it was formed just four months ago as a joint venture between China’s Suntech Power Holdings and MMA Renewable Ventures, Gemini comes into Austin with some solid background in big solar. MMA Renewables owns and operates the one of the largest solar PV project operating in the U.S. today — the 14-MW solar array at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, which went live in December 2007.
MMA Renewable and Suntech make quite the power couple, with MMA Renewable, part of Baltimore’s Municipal Mortgage & Equity, or MuniMae, handling the financing and development of large-scale solar projects, and Suntech taking care of the manufacturing of the solar cells and modules. However, both MuniMae and Suntech have had some recent difficulties: MuniMae, a real estate investment firm with more than $20 billion of assets under management, was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange last year, and Suntech announced earlier this month that it laid off 800 people, or 10 percent of its staff.
Fortunately, there’s a long-term payoff if the solar plant is approved — Austin Energy plans to hand over $10 million per year under a 25-year power purchase agreement, with the project set to go online by the end of 2010. The plant is expected to cover 300 acres, with 171,000 Suntech polycrystalline silicon modules that will be ground-mounted on single-axis trackers that can follow the sun throughout the day.
So they’ll be paying about 15c / kWh? That’s pretty steep for generation only (not even including additional T&D charges)
30MW @ 25% Capacity Factor gets you 65,700MWh/yr – I can’t imagine that they’ll get much better than about 4kWh/m2/day insolation for single axis tracking in Texas (see: http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/old_data/nsrdb/redbook/atlas/ )
At that rate, USD$10m /65,700mWh/yr =$152 / MWh, or about 15c / kWh
Again, its pretty high – not the grid-parity figures that have started to show up from some of the Southern California projects.
Are we sure that they are doing single access tracking? I haven’t seen that in any of the official releases. The ones pictured are SunPower Modules that MMA owns after buying the Nellis project to provide a PPA.
Hi Chris, I found the information about the single-axis trackers in an Austin Energy presentation on the project. I’ll try and find the original link to the presentation and post it here.
Here’s a link that I found (it’s a pdf):
http://www.parkspringsna.org/files/AustinEnergySolar_20090209.pdf
Greetings Austin,
With this great opprounity for our city, I would like for the citizens of Austin to consiter the following: