Buoy Meets World

Utility PG&E agrees to buy electricity from future wave-power farm

Posted at 6:38 AM on 19 Dec 2007

The utility Pacific Gas & Electric this week became the first power company in the United States to sign a deal agreeing to purchase electricity generated by wave power. The wave-power farm that would generate said electricity is still years from completion -- not to mention government approval -- but securing a power buyer is seen as an important step. In the first phase of the project, slated for completion by 2012, eight specially equipped buoys located two and a half miles off the coast of Northern California will together generate up to two megawatts of power. If all goes as planned and the project is granted the necessary approvals, it could be expanded to produce up to 100 megawatts. In other renewables news, the largest photovoltaic solar array in the U.S. opened this week at Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas, Nev. The 140-acre farm is expected to generate up to 30,000 megawatt-hours of electricity a year, or about 25 percent of the base's power use.

sources: San Francisco Chronicle, Reuters, U.S. News and World Report, Reuters

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Comments: (5 comments)

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PGE overall

We still don't rate them all that well at Scryve.

http://www.scryve.com/xwiki/bin/view/Companies/PGECorpora ...

Hopefully this is a step towards even bigger change.

http://www.scryve.com

by Arturi at 8:34 AM on 19 Dec 2007

Stop Energy Farms

Once again speaking for everything and everyone that is not human, we don't want wind farms, solar farms, wave-power farms, or any other unnatural structures in our homes (which humans call habitat). Please generate your electricity relatively naturally, but do so where it is used. There should be solar collectors on every roof and wind generators in every yard and parking lot. (We also ask you to stop destroying our planet with things like parking lots and the cars they're made for, but that's another issue.) Please do not destroy even more of the natural world with things like wave-power farms.

by Wolverine at 11:04 AM on 19 Dec 2007

electricity units...

In "Buoy meets World", you mention that a solar array at a farm in Nevada would generate "up to 30,000 megawatts of electricity a year". Megawatts is a rate (like gallons per minute of water flow) and megawatt-hours is a quantity (like gallons). I think you mean 30,000 megawatt-hours, which is the equivalent of about a 15-20 megawatt array. Still a pretty large array though.

Mike.

NHsolarguy

by NHsolarguy at 1:40 PM on 19 Dec 2007

oops

Thanks, Mike. It's been changed to "megawatt-hours."

www.grist.org

by Grist at 2:49 PM on 20 Dec 2007

Power Units

Why not just say it's an 8.3MW facility and throw in the average 1kW per household assumption to say "enough electricity for about 8300 homes"? MW-hrs/year seems a little odd to me...

by timdiller at 11:02 AM on 21 Dec 2007

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