Welcome to the new Intersect Power website and The Intersection blog. If you don’t already know us, Intersect Power is a clean infrastructure developer, owner, and operator working to preserve this planet for future generations through efficient, innovative, and scalable low-carbon energy solutions.
We’re more like a family or team of friends as most of us developed solar projects together for nearly a decade at Recurrent Energy prior to starting Intersect. That life-changing and rewarding run has influenced and molded our approach at Intersect in countless ways and served us well: where we once celebrated 500 KW, then 5 MW, then 50 MW deals, we now celebrate 500 MW+ projects. We work extremely hard for these victories, but we’d rather miss a few dinners with our kids than try to explain to them why we failed to address the existential crisis that our planet faces.
Like the industry itself we started out small, but today we plan in gigawatts, with 1.7 GW of solar under construction [add link to project or news page] and another 3 GW in the development pipeline. We’ve grown in other ways from those early days. Although Intersect’s first successes have been in large-scale utility solar, our vision, our ambition, and our endgame is in much more than solar development. Our future is in technologies like energy storage that can make our solar facilities fully dispatchable and, increasingly it is in the deep decarbonization of the transportation and industrial sectors that cheap renewables will enable.
Don’t get me wrong: we’re still actively involved in developing our solar project pipeline. It is our bread and butter, and we excel at it. We pride ourselves on being proper stewards of the capital we put to work, but also in being the first to identify the new and attractive combinations of risk and reward, that drive results in a maturing industry.
In addition to our five initial projects under construction, we’re building out our pipeline. One of the projects in that pipeline is Aramis [add link to Aramis page], located near Livermore, California. This 100 MW power plant will be much more than another large-scalesolar farm. The mixed-use renewable energy project will include energy storage paired with PV to provide smart dispatchable power. Among its many community-oriented features, the site will be designed for agrivoltaics—the combination of agriculture and photovoltaics—with areas for grazing sheep (an ovine addition to the maintenance crew) and bee-friendly forage growth. It will also include a public hiking trail, making once-private land open to the public for energy and environment education.
We still have a lot of hard work to get Aramis to the point of shovel-readiness, but we’re optimistic this inspiring “solar-plus” project will one day provide clean electricity to thousands of households in the Bay Area and provide a blueprint for next-generation, environmentally friendly solar development.
I’m looking forward to using this blog not only as a place to celebrate our work, but also as a means of sparking discourse around key issues and emerging trends in clean energy infrastructure and beyond. We’lldiscuss the intersections of energy and power markets, climate and carbon.We’ll explore federal policy, the true value of storage and the emerging promise of green hydrogen, and weigh in on the ways in which clean infrastructure is more challenging and more important than many understand.
We’ll also be sharing our first whitepaper in which we take a deep dive into how the risk and return of large-scale solar projects has changed in the past few years and what that means going forward, both for power markets and capital markets.
Finally, I want to thank the Intersect Power team, our partners throughout the value chain, and our customers for helping get us to this point in our not-quite four-year-old company’s life. To many it appears that we’ve arrived having finished the development of our first gigawatt scale portfolio, but we are only just embarking on the audacious plans that this company was created to pursue.
Lines cross every day, but when the right lines cross we call that an Intersection. When the price of clean power crossed over and dropped below the price of conventional power, that changed the world. We believe that was just the beginning. We see many more of these Intersections on the horizon and we’re eager to hasten their arrival. We hope you’ll follow us, join us, protest with us, and celebrate with us. Because in the end, if climate change shows us anything, it’s that our collective outcomes are inextricably linked and our own success is dependent upon the success of others. Welcome to The Intersection.