I had a fun morning today introducing one of our SMUD solar projects to the media with a little help from Governor Brown and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar!

Recurrent Energy hosted the event at our 19MW Bruceville project in Elk Grove, one of 88MW we have under 20 year power purchase agreements with SMUD. These are the same projects that we announced Google and KKR invested in in December.

The project provided a great backdrop for remarks by the governor and secretary about the importance of renewable energy and the coordination of state and federal policy. The event featured the signing of an MOU between the Department of Interior and the State of California to continue coordination of permitting for transmission lines on government land.

In my brief remarks before introducing our guests, I focused on the significance of the project in terms of where solar and renewable energy are today.

It struck me that looking back, today’s large solar projects rest on the shoulders of those who had the vision and leadership to imagine solar could work at large scale. Our energy infrastructure is a direct reflection of the policies that create markets for renewable energy, support permitting and interconnection, and facilitate the flow of private capital to make them a reality.

Today, the solar industry stands on the cusp of playing a significant role in conventional energy markets. We have harnessed industry to demonstrate how scale drives out costs. Yesterday’s expensive niche technologies can become tomorrow’s baseload energy supplies. Solar and renewables are no longer ‘alternative’, they will play an increasingly central role in our energy and grid.

Looking ahead, we have opened a door to the exciting possibility of a clean energy future. To make that possibility a reality we will need just as much vision and leadership as in past decades.