Samsung enters solar deal in California

CALIFORNIA - Samsung, the South Korean conglomerate best known to Americans for its televisions and cellphones, is jumping into the American solar business.

Pacific Gas and Electric, the California utility serving much of the northern and central parts of the state, asked regulators to approve a series of 25-year contracts for 130 megawattsÂ’ worth of photovoltaic power plants to be built by Solar Project Solutions, a joint venture between Samsung America and ENCO Utility Services, a former subsidiary of the utility company Edison International.

The deal is the latest of a spate of such agreements signed by California utilities as they take advantage of the increasing attractiveness of photovoltaic power as the price of solar modules falls and new competitors enter the market.

Unlike large solar thermal power plants that use mirrors to heat liquids to generate steam to run electricity-generating turbines, photovoltaic farms can be built relatively quickly near cities and existing transmission lines.

The Samsung venture will construct a 50-megawatt power plant and three 20-megawatt solar farms in Tulare County in CaliforniaÂ’s Central Valley. A fourth 20-megawatt power plant will be built in neighboring Kings County.

Four of the projects are to begin generating electricity in mid-2012, with the fifth coming online in early 2013, according to a regulatory filing. PG&E acknowledged that Samsung had so far built only three megawatts of solar power plants, though the company signed a deal last month with the government of Ontario, Canada, to develop 500 megawatts of solar energy, along with 2,000 megawatts of wind projects.

“Samsung has acted as the main engineering, procurement, and construction contractor for conventional energy projects” totaling more than 5,200 megawatts, Brian K. Cherry, a PG&E executive, wrote in a filing.

He also noted that ENCO was largely staffed with veterans of the utility Southern California Edison. Terms of the contract and the source of the photovoltaic panels the projects will use were not disclosed.