Packing sun power

Packing sun power
By Richard Bammer/ RBammer@TheReporter.com
Posted: 12/07/2008

Mariani Packing Co. has joined the ranks of heroes in the fight against global warming.

The Vacaville-based business, one of the nation's largest dried fruit manufacturers, earlier this week activated its new 1.1-megawatt solar power system and immediately reduced its corporate carbon footprint.

At a press conference in the company parking lot at 500 Crocker Drive, just a stone's throw from the five-football-fields-sized array of photovoltaic solar panels, CEO Mark Mariani flipped a symbolic oversized electric switch and his company became the third major business in the city to generate some of its electrical needs from the sun.

Mariani, whose grandfather started the company more than a century ago and used the sun to dry fruit, said the panels' electricity-generating capacity was the equivalent of taking 3,000 cars off the road for an entire year and enough energy to power 3,000 home for a year. That is roughly one-fourth of the power Pacific Gas & Electric currently supplies the company to dry more than 100 million pounds of fruit, from plums and apricots to cherries and cranberries, each year.

Speaking to a small gathering of print, TV journalists and city officials, Mariani said the project -- 5,800 sun-tracking panels financed at no-cost by SunEdison, a Maryland solar energy company, and installed in 90 days by groSolar, a Vermont concern -- was "a natural decision." He added that the notion of being a "steward of the land" includes caring for its water and air "and what we breath here."

The new system will lead to a better quality of life in Vacaville, said Mariani, adding, "We plan to grow with the city of Vacaville."

In brief remarks, Vacaville Mayor Len Augustine said the Mariani solar installation symbolized the 102-year-old company's "progressive" thinking about the future. The mayor's comments were, in part, an allusion to Mariani's father, Paul. Nearly 50 years ago, when irrigation boomed in the Central Valley and California was becoming the major food supplier to America, Paul Mariani installed the first micro-irrigation system in the state. It cut the company's water use by 70 percent at its Santa Clara Valley orchards.

"Mark thinks to the future," Augustine said, adding that Vacaville was something of a hub in California fast-growing solar energy market, exceeded only by Oakland and San Francisco.

Others who have gone "green" in recent months include ALZA Corp., the drug and medical delivery systems firm, which turned on a 1-megawatt facility last year, and the newly built State Compensation Insurance Fund, which in October activated a set of 300-kilowatt panels turned skyward above its parking lot, which can be seen by drivers going north or south along Interstate 505 near I-80.

"It tells companies that we are open for business," Augustine said, then quipped, "We have great sun -- and fog that makes people from San Francisco feel right at home. Mariani has put us on the map."

SunEdison, under its solar power purchase agreement, will charge no more than current retail costs for electricity supplied by the seven acres of solar panels. The economic lure for Mariani, of course, was the provision that stabilizes those rates for the life of the contract, 20 years. Most of the savings for Mariani will come during summer months, when PG&E boosts its rates during high-demand hours. On weekends, when the plant is closed, Mariani can sell power from its solar system to the PG&E grid and recoup some costs.

Company spokeswoman Kimberly Hathaway noted that during the first 20 years of production, the zero-emission system will reduce by more than 30 million pounds the amount of carbon dioxide that would have been spewed into the earth's atmosphere if the power had come from fossil fuels.

In an era of fluctuating but mostly historically increasing energy costs, corporate interest in renewable energy sources has burgeoned across the state, country and world, in part because the supply of fossil fuels is finite and diminishing.

In a 2007 report, the U.S. Department of Energy noted that concern over the environmental impact of burning fossil fuels has helped to spur interest in alternative fuels that are less polluting. However, renewable energy sources still make up only a small share of U.S. domestic energy production (about 6.8 percent or excluding hydropower about 4 percent). The major reason for this is the relatively higher cost (in some cases two to four times that of power obtained from traditional fuels).

At the Mariani plant, as it is elsewhere, the solar energy, an increasingly common source of electricity, will be generated using heat and light from the sun. The photovoltaic cells are made of semi-conducting materials that directly convert sunlight to electricity without any harmful waste product.

According to the DOE, the downside to solar energy is its heavy dependence on a range of factors, including location, time of year and weather.