ocean-sunriseThe largest photovoltaic solar power plant in the US went online this Tuesday, eighty miles southeast of Tampa, amid the citrus trees and cattle farms of Arcadia, Florida.

With its 25-megawatt output capacity, the Desoto Next Generation Solar Energy Center built by Florida Power and Light generates nearly twice as much power as the facility it surpassed – enough to power 3,000 homes and businesses. Occupying 180 acres, the plant cost $150 million to build and is the first of three plants Florida Power and Light has announced. According to the company, the three facilities together will generate 110-megawatts of power and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by more than 3.5 million tons – the equivalent of taking 25,000 cars off the road each year.

Desoto’s place as the nations will be short-lived as larger facilities come online in Arizona, where a 48-megawatt plant is under development, and in California. Despite these new installations, the US lags behind other nations in photovoltaic power, including Spain, Germany and China.

Federal Grants and Matching Private Investments to Further Smart-Grid Technologies

As the Desoto facility went online, US President Barack Obama used the occasion to announce the first grants awarded from $3.4 billion in government funds dedicated to upgrading the nation’s electrical grid.

Funding for 100 such grants comes from the $787 billion economic stimulus bill passed by Congress in February, and will be matched by $4.7 billion in private investment.

Grants will be used to further smart-grid technology, thus improving efficiency and enabling integration of energy from renewable and alternative sources.

A partial transcript of Obama’s remarks follows.

This plant will produce enough power to serve the entire city of Arcadia. Its construction was a boost to your local economy, creating nearly 400 jobs in this area. And over the next three decades, the clean energy from this plant will save 575,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions, which is the equivalent of removing more than 4,500 cars from the road each year for the life of the project. Think about that, 45,000 [sic] cars from the road each year for the life of the project.

And yet, to realize the full potential of this plant and others like it, we’ve got to do more than just add extra solar megawatts to our electrical grid. That’s because this grid—which is made up of everything from power lines to generators to the meters in your home—still runs on century-old technology. It wastes too much energy, it costs us too much money, and it’s too susceptible to outages and blackouts.

To offer one analogy, just imagine what transportation was like in this country back in the 1920s and 1930s before the Interstate Highway System was built. It was a tangled maze of poorly maintained back roads that were rarely the fastest or the most efficient way to get from point A to point B. Fortunately, President Eisenhower made an investment that revolutionized the way we travel—an investment that made our lives easier and our economy grow.

Now, it’s time to make the same kind of investment in the way our energy travels—to build a clean energy superhighway that can take the renewable power generated in places like DeSoto and deliver it directly to the American people in the most affordable and efficient way possible. Such an investment won’t just create new pathways for energy—it’s expected to create tens of thousands of new jobs all across America in areas ranging from manufacturing and construction to IT and the installation of new equipment in homes and in businesses. It’s expected to save consumers more than $20 billion over the next decade on their utility bills. And I know nobody minds seeing their utility bills cut. I’m sorry, Lew, but they really don’t mind that. It will make our grid more secure and more reliable, saving us some of the $150 billion we lose each year during power outages. It will allow us to more effectively transport renewable energy generated in remote places to large population centers, so that a wind farm in rural South Dakota can power homes in Chicago. And by facilitating the creation of a clean energy economy, building this 21st century energy infrastructure will help us lay a foundation for lasting growth and prosperity.

So that’s why today, I’m pleased to announce that under the Recovery Act, we are making the largest-ever investment in a smarter, stronger, and more secure electric grid. This investment will come in the form of 100 grants totaling $3.4 billion—grants that will go to private companies, utilities, cities, and other partners who have applied with plans to install smart grid technologies in their area.

And throughout this week, the members of my Cabinet are going to be fanning across the country talking about some of the winning projects. Some of the projects involve modernizing old, inefficient transmission lines that just waste too much energy. And to speed that process along, nine federal agencies have signed an agreement that will help break down the bureaucratic barriers that currently make it slow and costly to build new transmission lines on federal lands.

But most of the projects that are receiving grants involve the installation of what are known as smart meters—devices that will have a direct benefit for consumers who want to save money on their electric bills. For example, even as Florida Power & Light is bringing this solar plant online today, it also is deploying hundreds of thousands of these smart meters in people’s homes throughout Florida. Much like the Recovery through Retrofit plan we launched last week to boost the weatherization and retrofit industry, these devices will help you greatly improve the energy efficiency in your own home.

Now, let me explain what’s going on with these smart meters. Smart meters will allow you to actually monitor how much energy your family is using by the month, by the week, by the day, or even by the hour. So coupled with other technologies, this is going to help you manage your electricity use and your budget at the same time, allowing you to conserve electricity during times when prices are highest, like hot summer days. Through these investments in a variety of smart grid technologies, utilities like Florida Power & Light will also be able to monitor the performance of its electricity grid in real time, which means they’ll be able to identify and correct service interruptions more quickly and effectively. And all this information will help increase renewable energy generation, provide support for plug-in electric vehicles, and reduce the carbon pollution that causes climate change.

Here in this region of Florida, this project will reduce demand for electricity by up to 20 percent during the hottest summer days that stress the grid and power plants. It will provide smart meters to 2.6 million more customers. And most importantly, it will create thousands of jobs—good jobs, by the way, that can’t be outsourced; jobs that will last and jobs that pay a decent wage.

On their own, the opening of this new solar plant or the installation of new smart meters or the investment in grid modernization will not be enough to meet the challenges posed by our dependence on fossil fuels. But together, we can begin to see what a clean energy future will look like. We can imagine the day when you’ll be able to charge the battery on your plug-in hybrid car at night, because your smart meter reminded you that nighttime electricity is cheapest. In the daytime, when the sun is at its strongest, solar panels like these and electricity stored in car batteries will be able to power the grid with affordable, emission-free energy. The stronger, more efficient grid would be able to transport power generated at dams and wind turbines from the smallest towns to the biggest cities. And above all, we can see all this work that would be created for millions of Americans who need it and who want it, here in Florida and all across the country.

So we’re on the cusp of this new energy future. In fact, a lot of it is already taking place. Even as I’m here today, Vice President Biden is in Delaware announcing the reopening of a once-shuttered GM factory that will soon put people back to work building plug-in, electric hybrid vehicles. On Friday, I was in Boston—that’s good news. (Applause.) On Friday, I was in Boston, where workers will soon be breaking ground on a new Wind Technology Testing Center that will allow researchers in the United States to test the world’s newest and largest wind turbine blades for the very first time. And there are recovery projects like this in cities and counties all across the country.

The full transcript is available at http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2009/oct/27/transcript-presidents-speech-arcadia/