Government agrees to buy what Cenergy generates

A solar field planned for an area east of Fillmore will generate power for Ventura County, a deal that is expected to cut the county’s electric bill by $72,000 a year and its greenhouse gas emissions by 4.5 percent.

Cenergy Power leases the former oil refinery property from Chevron, and last year the county approved a 25-acre solar field on the site.

Cenergy has been looking for a buyer for the power it will generate and began negotiating a few months ago with the county, said Chad Chahbazi, Cenergy's director of project development.

Last week, the Ventura County Board of Supervisors approved a power purchase agreement with Cenergy, which will operate the Fillmore solar field under a subsidiary called Ventura Solar. County and Cenergy officials say the field should produce 3 megawatts of power starting around March 2018.

That’s about 8 percent of the county government’s annual electricity usage, said Paul Young, the chief deputy director of the county General Services Agency, which oversees county facilities.

Cenergy has agreed to sell the county its solar power for 6.5 cents per kilowatt hour for the next 25 years. The county typically pays 11 or 12 cents per kilowatt hour to Southern California Edison for non-solar power, Young said. The solar power from Fillmore will save the county about $72,000 in the first year of the agreement.

The new solar agreement will also allow the county to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 4.5 percent, Young said.

“That’s a big part of meeting our goal,” he said.

Under a policy passed by the supervisors in 2011, the county is aiming for a 15 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, from the starting point of its emissions level in 2005. The county’s emissions are already 8 percent lower than they were in 2005, so the new solar field will bring the reduction to around 12.5 percent.

“It’s a win-win-win for everyone,” Chahbazi said. “We get an offtaker for the project. The county gets lower power rates, and it gets them toward their carbon goals. And Chevron gets to be proud of what they have at the site now, versus what was there before.”

What was there before was a vacant lot for the past few years. Before that, it was a Texaco oil refinery, from 1915 to 1953, then an oil storage and pumping station, from 1953 until 2002. Since 1989, Chevron been part of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Superfund cleanup program; it's now in the final stages of its $10 million cleanup of lead, benzene and other dangerous materials.

During earlier phases of the cleanup, Chevron had plans for a business park on the property. But it encountered resistance from Fillmore residents and eventually moved to the idea of a solar field. The first company it found to lease the field, Stion Solar, obtained county permits for the project a little less than a year ago, but Chevron terminated its contract with Stion a few months later when the solar company wasn’t making progress toward finding a buyer for power and developing the site.

The county’s arrangement for the Fillmore field is what’s known as a “virtual net metering program.” Cenergy’s solar power won’t actually be transferred to county facilities. Instead, it will go back into Edison’s grid, and the county will get credits for its own consumption equal to the amount of power generated by the solar panels.

The field will be the biggest single source of solar power for the county and will account for about 40 percent of its solar power. The county already has solar panels on the rooftops and parking lots of many of its buildings, including the Ventura County Government Center in Ventura, Todd Road Jail near Santa Paula and the Juvenile Justice Center near Oxnard.