Duke Energy Buys 14Mw Blue Wing Solar Project

Duke, a publicly owned utility with about 35,000 megawatts of electricity generating capacity, serves about 4 million customers in North Carolina, western South Carolina, southwestern Ohio, Indiana, and northern Kentucky.

Duke’s electricity generation profile (53.3 percent coal, oil and gas, 46.4 percent nuclear, 0.1 percent hydro, .02 percent wind, and .001 percent solar) is very brown, so the addition of 14 megawatts of pure, clean solar energy from the Blue Wing Solar project is a good move toward some badly needed “green”, especially given North Carolina’s renewable portfolio standard (RPS, or renewable energy standard) requiring state utilities to generate 12.5 percent of their electricity from sources other than fossil fuels by 2021.

The Blue Wing purchase, from Boulder, Colorado-based Juwi Solar, consists of an array of 214,500 ground-mounted solar panels on 112 (or is it 139?) acres near San Antonio, Texas, with construction slated to start this spring and completion scheduled for the end of the year.

Juwi Solar is co-owned and operated by Fred Jung and Matthias Willenbacher, two of Germany’s most successful and dedicated entrepreneurs. The Blue Wing project will sell its energy (and buy and sell SRECs, or solar renewable energy credits) under a 30-year contract with San Antonio, Texas municipal utility, CPS Energy, formerly City Public Service. CPS is the nation’s largest municipally owned utility company, serving 677,000 electricity customers and more than 318,000 natural gas customers in its 1,566-square-mile service area.

The panels will be manufactured by Tempe, Arizona-based First Solar Inc., whose Feb. 2009 announcement of a $1-per-watt manufacturing milestone launched it to the forefront of solar stocks, even during the worst recession since the Great Depression. First Solar crafts its modules using cadmium telluride (CdTe) deposition to create thin-film solar photovoltaic panels, or modules.

Duke Energy, which is looking to develop U.S. solar projects in conjunction with China-based ENN Group, in 2008 launched its $100-million solar roof plan (distributed solar generation on public and private roofs), but had to cut that figure in half after regulators refused to allow the utility to recoup costs from ratepayers.

This, at almost the same time that Duke’s Indiana unit got the go-ahead from utility regulators to raise rates by two percent to pay for a coal gasification plant, leaving the very public impression that Duke was less dedicated to “dirty” energy than caught in a regulatory quagmire that has wrong-footed CEO Jim Rogers at every renewable energy turn.