RENEWABLE ENERGY PROJECTS OK’D
San Diego Community Power approves contract for center in Chula Vista
San Diego Community Power recently added a pair of renewable energy projects to its energy portfolio, including one in South County.
At its monthly meeting earlier this month, the community choice energy program serving customers in seven jurisdictions across San Diego County approved signing contracts for a solar and battery storage project in Kern County and a battery facility that will be built in Chula Vista.
SDCP agreed to a 15-year deal with Wellhead Electric Co., which is building the Chula Vista Energy
Center 2 that will provide 50 megawatts of capacity and nearly 200 megawatt-hours of power from a four-hour lithium-ion battery system.
Scheduled for completion by June 2026, the development is expected to bring about 130 jobs during construction and will be staffed by six Wellhead Electric employees based in the San Diego area. Wellhead promises to provide scholarships to students in science, technology, engineering and math.
The Chula Vista Energy Center 2 project is designed to displace natural-gas-fired generation during peak hours on California’s power grid and reduce curtailments of renewable energy sources.
“Since this is in Chula Vista, I’m excited about it,” said SDCP board member John McCann, who is also Chula Vista’s mayor.
SDCP’s board also approved a power purchase agreement with Pelicans Jaw Solar LLC, a subsidiary of SB Energy, a Californiabased solar and storage developer.
A solar farm at the Pelicans Jaw project is expected to generate 226 megawatts of photovoltaic capacity. Four-hour batteries at the site in northwestern Kern County will provide 472 megawatt-hours of storage to the power system. The facility is expected to provide about 637,000 megawatt-hours of long-term renewable energy deliveries to SDCP’s power supply.
Pelicans Jaw guarantees starting commercial operations by April 2027. The contract runs for 15 years, and developers have committed to contributing $500,000 to SDCP’s community benefit fund.
As is common in California power purchase contracts, the financial details of the Pelicans Jaw as well as the Chula Visa Energy Center 2 transactions are confidential.
The board also approved three contracts for resource adequacy — that is, agreements to make sure SDCP meets requirements set by the California Public Utilities Commission that energy providers have collectively lined up enough capacity and reserves to maintain
the state’s electric system.
Last year, the commission slapped SDCP with a $1.033 million fine, saying the energy program “deliberately failed to procure sufficient system capacity.” SDCP officials said they tried to purchase contracts and insisted there simply wasn’t enough available power on the energy market to buy.
The board OK’d resource adequacy agreements for:
• 50 megawatts/200 megawatt-hours of lithiumion battery-storage capacity at the Hecate Grid Scafell Storage 1 project in Ramona, which is expected to go online March 2027, if not sooner.
• 51 megawatts of wind energy capacity starting in January 2025 with Duran Mesa LLC in New Mexico.
• a 1,208 megawatt-hour lithium-ion battery storage project at the Athos facility in Riverside with SB Energy, starting in June 2026.
SDCP is one of 25 community choice aggregation programs, or CCAs, that have sprung up across the
state in recent years that purchase electricity generation for residents and businesses in their respective municipalities.
CCAs were created by the California Legislature in 2002 to encourage the growth of renewable energy and provide competition to traditional investor-owned utilities such as San Diego Gas & Electric by offering customers higher percentages of renewable sources at comparable or slightly lower rates.
Utilities such as SDG&E still perform every other duty outside of power generation purchases — such as maintaining poles, wires and power lines in their respective transmission and distribution systems, plus handling customer services, such as billing.
As per state rules, once a jurisdiction establishes a CCA, customers are automatically enrolled. But if customers want to remain with the incumbent investor-owned utility, they can opt out.
Serving customers since 2021, SDCP purchases power for its customers in the cities of San Diego, Chula Vista, La Mesa, Encinitas, Imperial Beach, National City and the unincorporated areas of San Diego County. With almost 940,000 accounts, SDCP is the second-largest CCA in the state.