DesertBlog

Different Day, Same Old Spin

Oh, those tricky Sempra/SDG&E PR people! Seems they can spin any report to make it look like their company is leading the way in renewable energy.

Yesterday, Sempra issued a press release touting SDG&E’s #4 spot on the list of top ten utilities in the U.S. for solar power capacity, published by the Solar Electric Power Association. The release was picked up verbatim by the Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch.

Wow! Number 4 in the whole United States! Sounds pretty good, right?

Not when you check the graphs published in the SEPA report, which clearly show SDG&E falling far behind its fellow California power companies, Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric, in terms of total megawatts of solar power capacity. In fact, even though it also benefits from California’s highly favorable natural and regulatory climate for solar power, SDG&E’s #4 spot comes in closer to utilities in Long Island and New Jersey than it does to SCE or PG&E. This is hardly something to crow about.

Here are the graphs:

This second graph shows total megawatts per utility on the “customer side” of the meter. This is mainly customers who have photovoltaic solar panels on their roofs. SDG&E moves up in this graph, with a bigger bar, but it’s still closer to Long Island and New Jersey power companies than it is to #1 PG&E (which, after all, has to contend with cloudy Northern California weather).

Clearly, SDG&E can do a lot more to develop its solar capacity on “the customer side of the meter,” rather pinning all of its hopes on projects on “the utility side of the meter” (large-scale solar projects in the desert). The company should concentrate on this area, and on energy efficiency measures (where it also lags), before considering the Sunrise Powerlink.