Brilliant skies to power 9,000 homes
Southern Company and Turner Renewable Energy forged a partnership to develop renewable energy resources, with the initial focus on large-scale solar photovoltaic plants in the Southwest. Cimarron is the first fruit of that partnership.
The facility will be among the nation's largest solar photovoltaic plants when it begins commercial operation at the end of the year. The electricity generated there — enough to meet the needs of about 9,000 homes — will be delivered to customers of Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, which has a 25-year agreement to purchase the facility's energy.
Keeping our options open
Relying solely on fossil fuels—or any one source of electricity for that matter—
won't cut it today. So we're adding to our options, including renewable energy.
It's important to be practical as we add options. We need to make a lot of electricity. Energy efficiency programs can help, but there's no realistic way to make up for all coal-fueled plants with wind and solar farms. We just demand many times more power than these options can produce. So renewables are going to be one of many fuels we use for electricity. This will help with timing issues, too. When the wind doesn't blow, you still want your electricity. Fossil-fueled combustion or nuclear plants will remain on to meet constant demand. A composite solution seems to work best, a portfolio of energy sources to balance affordability, reliability, sustainability and security. And that includes renewables. (See also Do We Have the Energy for the Next Transition? by Richard A. Kerr, science.org.)
Biomass
After years of successful power plant testing, we're ready to go commercial with biomass. In Texas, we're constructing one of the largest 100 percent biomass plants in the nation. The 100-megawatt Nacogdoches Generating Facility will serve the city of Austin for 20 years. We're also evaluating the conversion of existing plants in the Southeast from coal to biomass. We’re also producing energy from landfill methane gas, and we’re marketing geothermal technology.
Solar
We recently formed a partnership with Turner Renewable Energy, owned by business leader and environmentalist Ted Turner, to pursue development of renewable energy projects in the U.S. Initially, we will focus on developing and investing in large-scale solar projects in the Southwest, where solar resources are currently more cost efficient, with the goal of further commercializing the technology and making it more cost-competitive.
Wind
Our 196-foot meteorological tower on Florida’s Gulf Coast measures wind speed and duration and air temperature. By analyzing this data, we will be able to determine if wind is a cost-effective energy resource in northwest Florida.
Hydro
Hydropower is the least expensive and cleanest form of energy we produce. It is an important part of our current fuel mix and future plans. Pumped-storage hydro—a form of energy storage—releases water for generation, captures it in a lower reservoir, and pumps it back up to a higher reservoir for re-use.
