Negative Prices

On April 23, spot wholesale prices at Southern California’s SP15 hub, which includes Los Angeles and San Diego, averaged minus $60.94 a megawatt-hour for the 10 hours from 8 a.m., with solar accounting for as much as 23 percent of power generation in the hour ended at noon. The negative price meant that the seller, wanting to keep its generator running, paid the buyer to take the power.

“I was here before we broke ground and seeing it then and now amazes me at how quickly we were able to build the project and coexist with the environment and generate 550 megawatts of green power,” Gary Hood, project manager for Topaz, about 250 miles southeast of San Francisco, said as he showed a visitor around.

Berkshire is already producing power at Solar Star, which will be fully operational in the third quarter. Apple said in February it is investing $850 million in a plant that First Solar Inc. is building nearby.

“We will see renewables increasingly make up part of the resources stack just because it makes economic sense,” Jonathan Mir, head of North American power and energy at Lazard Freres & Co. LLC in New York, said by phone May 13.

“Appreciating that there are important qualitative differences between non-renewables and renewables, I don’t think people can simply say with a straight face anymore that renewables are more expensive,” he said.

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