Minnesota: Solar Worth 14.5c per kWh

The Alamosa Solar Generating Project, located on 225 acres in the San Luis Valley near Alamosa, Colorado, is the largest high-concentrating solar photovoltaic power generation system in the world. It consists of more than 500 dual-axis, pedestal-mounted tracker assemblies, each producing 60 kilowatts. each tracker assembly is 70 feet wide by 50 feet high and contains 7,560 Fresnel lenses that concentrate sunlight by a multiple of 500 onto multi-junction cells. Photo by USGS Mineral Resources Program

Sometime next week, Minnesota’s Department of Commerce is likely to find that Xcel Energy can and should pay 14.5 cents per kilowatt/hour for net-metered rooftop electricity. That “value-of-solar”calculation was first implemented by the municipal utility in Austin, Texas. If it becomes a precedent for other net-metering states, distributed solar will boom.

Read John Farrell’s analysis.

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