MARK: Thank you for joining Power Talk radio 1460 in 101 FM, Mark Carbonaro with you and we have a Luis Alvarez CEO of the Alvarez Technology Group with us to talk about technology. Good day Luis.
LUIS: Hello Mark. How are you?
MARK: Doing really well… got a really interesting story to jump on here that Apple is going to spend $850 million to build a solar energy farm in the far reaches of South Monterey County. What’s this all about? Who’s going to get the energy generated by it and what do we need to know?
LUIS: This is a really cool cool project and Southern Monterey County is for those of us who have driven down there is kind of dry, dusty kind of open area and they want to take a very small part of it about… actually they say about three percent of all the land that the first family owned and found there. And they want to build this massive solar plant that’s going to be built by Solar City which is an organization that has a presence in the Monterey County and it’s going to cost about $815 Million that’s going to be funded by Apple and the idea is that the 130 Megawatts of electricity from this project will be used by Apple to power their facilities up in the bay area as well as all their retail stores in California.
MARK: Well how are they going to direct that power towards that end or is this going to be the kind of thing where they are going to sell the power back to PG&E and it will offset with their paying for their electrical uses throughout the state?
LUIS: Yeah that’s pretty much the way it works. When you buy power and all of us actually have the ability to buy power from different sources but the reality is, all you are really doing is – it all gets mixed into the system but you get the credit of buying a power from that particular provider and then somehow PG&E does all the math for you. So the electricity that they will get from this plant will be put on to the grid just like all the power in California and they will get credit for having purchased it from this particular facility.
MARK: So it’s really not possible unless you have the solar rays sitting on your roof on your own property, it’s really not possible for Apple to run align like a power cord from that solar ray in Park Field all the way of to Cuppertino and-
LUIS: Yeah.
MARK: –power their facilities. So it’s in kind of thing where we use this amount of Megawatts between all of our stores and our headquarters. We’re using exactly this amount of Megawatts so we’re going to build a facility to offset that so that we become carbon neutral.
LUIS: Exactly and part of the process-
MARK: Oh there’s going be some big tax credits for that for doing good-
LUIS: I would say part of the benefits right because they said and nobody does anything for lapse some sort of an ulterior motive.
MARK: Right. Exactly.
LUIS: Is that they are going to earn a significant number of tax credit for doing this deal and they are going to be able to sell those back into the Carbon tax credit system to offset — somebody else can buy those credits and offset their use of dirtier energy.
MARK: Fascinating. Well constructions expect to begin in middle of this year maybe by the summer be completed by the end of 2016. Now it’s not a done deal because there are environmental groups and other land owners in South County that are coming against this proposal already. So it’s in its very nasant stages so we see we’ll what ends up happening with this if really things go through.
LUIS: Absolutely.
MARK: Okay. Well Louise I appreciate you joining us and talk about that when we get back together again on Saturday how about if we talk about omnipotent hackers tied NSA hiding for 14 years found at last. AlvarezTG.com on the web and AlvarezTG is the twitter handle and Louise what’s the toll free number for the i-team.
LUIS: Give us a call at 866-78iteam that’s 866-7848326.
MARK: Thank you Louise.
LUIS: Thank you Mark.
