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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 operating.
Electrify America isn’t working this photo voltaic farm. As a substitute, the corporate struck a 15-year digital energy buy settlement (VPPA) with renewable vitality developer Terra-Gen. It’s the newest improvement in Electrify America’s efforts to hyperlink itself to renewable vitality tasks. The companies broke floor on the plant again in February.
Your typical VPPA entails a purchaser, which pays a hard and fast worth for no matter vitality is generated, and a vendor, which generates the vitality and sells it by way of the grid for the client at market charges. The client assumes some threat, as a result of the vendor would possibly wind up promoting the vitality beneath the mounted price. But, the client might additionally see the upside if market costs pattern above the mounted price.
In different phrases: Electrify America is taking up some threat with this deal, and in alternate it will get to say it’s serving to clear up the grid whereas doubtlessly benefiting from rising vitality costs.
Renewable vitality builders play a vital position 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 vitality that will not in any other case be obtainable,” the corporate stated in a press release (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. (If you’re 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 vitality its funding will generate is “similar to the facility drawn by 500 EVs charging without delay at a mean velocity 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 result of this deal will likely be “similar to the carbon sequestered by planting almost 40 million timber.”
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