The Utah Public Service Commission’s designated Presiding Officer will conduct a Sept. 8 scheduling conference on an Aug. 27 application by PacifiCorp d/b/a Rocky Mountain Power requesting approval of a Power Purchase Agreement with Three Peaks Power LLC dated Aug. 12.
The agreement provides for the sale to PacifiCorp of energy to be generated by Three Peaks Power from a solar facility located on 650 acres near Cedar City in Iron County, Utah. The agreement is for a term of 20 years from the Commercial Operation Date of the project.
The agreement constitutes a “New QF Contract” under the PacifiCorp Interjurisdictional Cost Allocation Protocol previously filed with the commission in a prior docket. According to the terms of the protocol, the costs of the QF provisions would be allocated as a system resource, unless any portion of those costs exceed the cost the company would have otherwise incurred acquiring comparable resources.
A heavily redacted copy of the PPA attached to the Aug. 27 application blanks out key project specs, like project size and output. But, a project diagram buried in the PPA indicates that the size is 104.5 MW (dc)/80 MW (ac), and that the project would be made up of 342,720 photovoltaic modules.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management has been taking comment until Sept. 2 on an environmental assessment covering a power line needed to interconnect an 80-MW (ac) solar project to the PacifiCorp transmission system in Utah. Three Peaks Power, which is wholly owned and operated by Scatec Solar North America Inc., proposes to construct, operate, and maintain a 2.1-mile segment of new transmission line to support power transmission from the future Three Peaks Solar Power Plant to the existing Three Peaks Substation approximately 10 miles northwest of Cedar City, Utah. The PPA shows the interconnect point as the Three Peaks Substation.
The Three Peaks facility would be an 80-MW (ac) solar photovoltaic (PV) plant constructed on private property northwest of Cedar City in Iron County. The transmission line would transmit up to 210,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of renewable solar electricity per year to the Rocky Mountain Power system, BLM said.
Project contact information provided by BLM is: Three Peaks Power LLC c/o Scatec Solar North America Inc., 2330 Marinship Way, Suite 300, Sausalito, CA 94965.
