Electrify America, the EV charging firm created by Volkswagen within the aftermath of its diesel emissions scandal, stated on Tuesday {that a} new, 75 megawatt photo voltaic farm in Southern California is now up and working.
Electrify America isn’t working this photo voltaic farm. As an alternative, the corporate struck a 15-year digital energy buy settlement (VPPA) with renewable power developer Terra-Gen. It’s the newest improvement in Electrify America’s efforts to hyperlink itself to renewable power initiatives. The companies broke floor on the plant again in February.
Your typical VPPA entails a purchaser, which pays a set value for no matter power is generated, and a vendor, which generates the power and sells it by way of the grid for the customer at market charges. The client assumes some danger, as a result of the vendor may wind up promoting the power beneath the fastened price. But, the customer might additionally see the upside if market costs pattern above the fastened price.
In different phrases: Electrify America is taking over some danger with this deal, and in change it will get to say it’s serving to clear up the grid whereas probably benefiting from rising power costs.
Renewable power builders play a vital function in decarbonizing the grid, however simply how far do VPPAs go in mitigating local weather change? This appears to be an open query. Even Electrify America’s press launch leaves some wiggle room on this entrance: “This model new building contributes to ‘additionality,’ by producing new renewable power that could not in any other case be obtainable,” the corporate stated in an announcement (Emphasis: TechCrunch).
Would possibly one other purchaser have stepped in if Electrify America hadn’t? Like all offset-related deal, it’s troublesome to say whether or not the settlement is facilitating one thing that definitively wouldn’t have occurred in any other case. (In case you are conscious of any educational research on the environmental affect of VPPAs, please get in contact: harri.weber [at] techcrunch.com).
For its half, Electrify America’s announcement states that the height power its funding will generate is “corresponding to the facility drawn by 500 EVs charging directly at a mean pace of 150 kilowatts.” The photo voltaic farm’s annual “manufacturing is projected at 225 Gigawatt-hours,” Electrify America provides. In an earlier press launch, the agency claimed the end result of this deal will likely be “corresponding to the carbon sequestered by planting practically 40 million bushes.”