El Phoenix Sun

14-MW Array, Nellis Air Force Base, NV.

Tucson Electric Power Company’s (TEP) announcement yesterday that it intends to build a 25-MW solar PV power plant (twice the size of the largest existing system in the country and seven times larger than the giant array used as a backdrop by CA Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger the day before in announcing his own power initiative) outside of Tucson, Arizona, didn’t put a dent in the national news-cycle.

It should have. This is big news.

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We asked David Arfin, vice president, strategy, at SolarCity to comment on the Arizona Corporation Commission’s ruling this week to allow two Scottsdale schools to have SolarCity install PV thin-film panels on their roofs. This is the first time such an arrangement has been approved in the state.

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Desert Mountain High School (Scottsdale, AZ)

“Let schools take solar energy lead”

Almost exactly a year after the Scottsdale Republic newspaper ran an editorial with the above headline,  the Arizona Corporation Commission gave two Scottsdale high schools permission to do just that.

For a project that seems so straightforward (and whose benefits are so obvious, here in the Valley of the Sun)  proponents faced a bewildering series of regulatory and legal hurdles.

It was, according to ACC chair, Kris Mayes, “perhaps the most complicated case…in the history of Arizona.”

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