8minute Solar Nabs Its First Supply Deal With California Community-Choice Aggregators

Large-scale developer 8minute Solar Energy said this week it had signed power-purchase agreements with two Northern California community-choice aggregators for a 250-megawatt solar project located in the state, including 150-megawatt hours of energy storage.

8minute, which develops solar and storage, has already inked deals for projects with all of California’s large investor-owned utilities: Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Electric & Gas. But the project announced this week is the developer’s first foray in the world of CCAs, which have increasingly pulled customers and thus demand from California’s traditional utilities.

Offtakers Monterey Bay Community Power (MBCP) and Silicon Valley Clean Energy (SVCE) have now worked together on seven renewables projects, five of which are solar-plus-storage. The CCAs announced two solar and storage projects built by NextEra and First Solar earlier this month. In April the two CCAs published a joint request for proposals seeking 2 million more megawatt-hours of energy delivered between 2021 and 2024, which also closed this week.