January 17, 2007—Southern California Edison (SCE) agreed in late December to buy all the power produced by a new 1,500-megawatt (MW) wind facility. The contract with Alta Windpower Development is reportedly the largest wind energy contract ever signed by a US utility.
Australia’s Allco Finance Group and Oak Creek Energy Systems plan to build the Alta Wind Energy Center, designed to be the world’s largest wind power facility, in the Tehachapi Wind Resource Area 100 miles north of Los Angeles, CA. The project will cover 50 square miles—triple the size of any existing US wind farm, says SCE.
According to Allco, the facility will be built over the next 5 to 10 years in increments of about 100 MW. According to Oak Creek Energy, those incremental additions will be timed to match the availability of new power transmission from the proposed 4,500-MW Tehachapi Transmission Project.
SCE also signed a new contract with Chateau Energy to purchase 15 MW of power from a biomass facility in the Mesquite Lake area of Imperial County, and signed an amendment to an existing contract with Edom Hill that will allow Edom’s wind project to increase its capacity to 20 MW by “repowering,” or upgrading technology to more efficiently capture additional wind energy.
For more information visit Edison International.
