More from Intersolar and the sold-out Greentech Media event:

Public Private Partnerships for PV Development: A 5-MW PV installation in SF

Arno Harris, the CEO of Recurrent Energy spoke at a session at this year's Intersolar along with a solar project partner, Laura Spanjian of San Francisco Public Utilities.

Recurrent Energy is a distributed power company, which is attempting to put power near the load and essentially an Independent Power Producer (IPP). It sells electricity to its customers. Recurrent has partnered with the City of San Francisco to deploy a 5-megawatt PV installation on the City by the Bay's Sunset Reservoir.

'Finding Scale Opportunities'

Recurrent has a global focus with activity in the U.S., Canada, Spain, Germany and elsewhere. It recently acquired UPC Solar's assets which gives it a 350-megawatt solar pipeline and it formed a partnership with PE investor Hudson Energy Partners to create a $75 million platform for investing in solar assets.

Combined with its banking relationships, the company can pursue solar at any scale.

"What distinguishes the company from our peers is that we established ourselves in the beginning as an energy company – we keep these projects in our portfolio," Harris added.

The Sunset Reservoir is going to be 5 megawatts and will use more than 25,000 solar modules.

It's essentially a rooftop installation but one that spreads out over more than 12 football fields. When complete it will be the largest municipal solar project.

Other key facts of the project:

  • Largest PV installation in California
  • Largest municipal project in the U.S.
  • It will eliminate the impact of 750 cars
  • It will create 71 green jobs
  • The SF PUC is the power and REC offtaker
  • Recurrent Energy is the system owner, operator and site lessee

Advantages of this approach:

  • The capital intensity of this project, normally a tremendous barrier is overcome
  • A PPA spreads the price of the system over the useful life of the project

Key terms of the PPA:

  • 25-year term with two buyout option
  • Bundled power and RECs at $235 per MWh

Lessons learned according to Arno:

  • Politics is part of the project
  • There is a high sensitvity to allocation of jobs by trade and district
  • It took about a year between the issuance of the RFP and approval by SF Mayor Gavin Newsom

Lessons learned according to Laura Spanjian of San Francisco Public Utilities:

  • There is an emotional issue of public ownership of power assets
  • It was the choice of a public-private partnership or nothing at all – public only wasn't an option
  • The second issue was why lock into the price of solar when the price is dropping? 

Spanjian of the SF Public Utilities answered the question: "To be a leader we had to act now"

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