TEMPE, Ariz. (AP) -- The Salt River Project wants to buy up to 100 megawatts of power from new solar photovoltaic power plants to be located in the Phoenix area by late 2013.
The state's second-largest electricity provider is asking companies willing to build the ground-based facilities to present it with "purchased power" proposals. Such deals generally involve an investor building a plant and contracting to sell its power.
SRP wants the new "utility-scale" facilities to each produce between 5 and 20 megawatts of electricity. A megawatt of capacity is generally enough to power about 1,000 average homes.
SRP is trying to increase the amount of power it gets from renewable energy from 7 percent to 15 percent of its retail sales by 2015. It supplies power to more than 900,000 Phoenix-area customers.
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