Southern California Edison (SCE) is spreading the renewable energy love with its new solar rooftop project. The company recently awarded contracts to 36 independent power producers to help install solar arrays on 31 rooftops and five ground-based sites in the Southern California region. The project will generate 250 megawatts of power and should create approximately 1,200 green jobs in Southern California.

 

These contracts are part of SCE’s solar rooftop project that was first approved last summer. The project will ultimately create 500 megawatts of solar power but SCE opened up the project to competitors and now multiple companies will be able to contribute to Southern California’s growing green economy.

 

Marc Ulrich with SCE commented on the project, “We’re working to help California meet its Million Solar Roofs goal and supply even more renewable energy to our customers where and when it’s most needed, without the added time and expense to construct major new transmission facilities.” Source: SCE

 

Although the projects are limited to the Southern California area, they go beyond Los Angeles and include installations in smaller communities in the region.

 

 

Once the entire project is complete, the solar panels will cover an area of 4 square miles (when combined) and generate enough electricity to provide power to 325,000 homes. This will just boost SCE’s renewable energy portfolio, which amounted to 13.6 billion kilowatt hours of clean energy generation delivered in 2009.

 

Although it has been several years since the Enron-generated black outs plagued the state, the need to create sufficient amounts of energy to meet the state’s growing energy demand is on everyone’s mind. If you’re expanding your energy production, why not do it with renewable energy? Kudos to SCE for growing its own green energy projects but also opening up these projects to independent companies as well.