One of the nation’s largest utilities has been given the green light to nearly double the amount of solar power it buys through its Green Energy Program.
Georgia Power, part of Southern Company, said yesterday that it has received approval from the Georgia Public Service Commission to offer a new tariff for small-scale solar power installations.
Available from January, the Solar Purchase Tariff will offer Georgia Power customers the chance to sell their power to the utility for 17 cents per kilowatt-hour.
The tariff is limited to installations of less than 100 kilowatts in output, and will cover 1.5 megawatts of projects overall.
A further condition of the tariff is for all those on it to provide Georgia Power with all cost and operational information, so the company can gain experience in solar electricity generation.
In a second part of the program, Georgia Power will issue a request for proposals for a further 1MW of solar capacity, offering a price of 15 cents per kilowatt-hour maximum. The RFP has no limit on project size up to the 1MW total.
Purchasing
The new solar generating capacity will be made available for Georgia Power’s customers to buy through its Premium Green Energy product, where 100-kilowatt-hour blocks are available at $5 per block, comprising 50% solar energy. The company’s Standard Green Energy, comprising biomass power, is priced at $3.50 per block.
The company, which serves 2.3 million customers across Georgia, said nearly 4,200 customers have purchased 3.8 million kilowatt-hours of green energy through the Green Energy program since it began in October 2006.
“Since we began offering customers a 50% solar option, we’ve added almost 1,000 new blocks of the Premium Green Energy product to the program,” said Angela Strickland, director of Energy Efficiency at Georgia Power.
“By increasing our solar capacity in the program to 5.4 MW, we hope to keep pace with the significant growth of solar purchases by our customers both now and in the future.”
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