San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E), a subsidiary of Sempra Energy (NYSE: SRE) serving San Diego County, Calif., said April 12 that it would purchase up to 80 megawatts of electricity produced by concentrated photovoltaics (CPV) under power-purchase agreements (PPAs).

Up to 50 megawatts will be provided by Sol Orchard, LLC, which will develop 21 sites, most with arrays about 2 megawatts in size. Soitec Solar Development, LLC, a French company building a manufacturing facility in San Diego County with Tenaska, will provide 30 megawatts to SDG&E under PPAs.

The 50 megawatts of solar orchards that will be built by Sol Orchard represent a first for SDG&E, said spokesperson Stephanie Donovan.

“They’re trying to package solar trees to create a virtual solar orchard. This is the first time we’ve had a distributed generation power-purchase agreement,” she said. “I think the idea is that these are all going to be individual projects. Some might be less than 2 megawatts, some may be as large as 4 megawatts, scattered around the county.”

Sol Orchard will use SolFocus concentrated photovoltaic arrays mounted on trackers to follow the sun throughout the day.

“The SolFocus array literally looks like a tree. It moves throughout the day, so it looks like a living orchard,” said Jeff Brothers, president of Sol Orchard.

The projects will be larger than most distributed generation projects.

“I call it distributed utility. Smaller projects that act like distributed generation that can provide a bigger bump, but connected in the distributed generation network,” Brothers said.

The solar farms are designed to be near local substations to help alleviate the need for central plants and big transmission lines, according to Brothers.

“When most people think of distributed generation, they’re thinking of rooftops. In this case, we’ve found [numerous] tracts of land to put 2 megawatts on,” Brothers said.

Sol Orchard has partnered with farmers or ranchers and found idle land for sale to install the SolFocus CPV arrays on.

The company is now in the permitting process and plans to break ground on at least some of the projects before the year is out.

“We may even have one or two done by the end of the year,” Brothers said.

The 30 megawatts of Soitec’s Concentrix CPV arrays will be built at three locations in Eastern San Diego County, according to Donovan. One installation will be 20 megawatts and two will be 5 megawatts each.

That’s in addition to the recently announced 150 megawatts of Concentrix arrays that Tenaska will develop in Imperial County, Calif., also under a PPA with SDG&E.

“What’s unique about the arrangement with Soitec is San Diego will benefit and then benefit again from having them built in San Diego,” Donovan said. “In total, we’re projecting that more than 2,000 jobs will be created in Imperial County and San Diego County,” Donovan said.

Image courtesy of SolFocus.