First Solar inks deal with PG&E to build two PV power plants
First Solar Inc., Tempe, Ariz., has been on a wild ride over the past four years. Its stock price skyrocketed to more than $300 a share in May 2008, before plunging more than 90% to a low of $11.40 a share in June. Its share price has almost doubled since then, and today the company announced that it has signed power purchase agreements with Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E) for 72 megawatts of solar electricity to be generated at two photovoltaic power plants that it's developing in central California.
Together, the two PV power plants will produce enough renewable energy to power some 24,000 California homes. The power purchase agreements -- each with a delivery term beginning in 2019 -- are subject to approval by the California Public Utilities Commission, whose decision is expected in the first half of 2013.
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Jim Lucy Blog
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Jim Lucy has been wandering through the electrical market for more than 30 years, most of the time as an editor for Electrical Wholesaling, Electrical Marketing newsletter and CEE News. During that time he and the editorial team for the publications have won numerous national awards for their coverage of the electrical business. He showed an early interest in electricity, when as a youth he had an idea for a hot dog cooker. Unfortunately, the first crude prototype malfunctioned and the arc nearly blew him out of his parents' basement. Before becoming an editor for Electrical Wholesaling magazine and Electrical Marketing, he earned a BA degree in journalism and a MA in communications from Glassboro State College, Glassboro, NJ., which is formerly best known as the site of the 1967 summit meeting between President Lyndon Johnson and Russian Premier Aleksei Nikolayevich Kosygin, and now best known as the New Jersey state college that changed its name in 1992 to Rowan University because of a generous $100 million donation by N.J. zillionaire industrialist Henry Rowan. Jim is a Brooklyn-born Jersey Guy happily transplanted in the fertile plains of Kansas for the past 20 years.