Corona Enterprises, LLC

For decades solar photovoltaic technology has been providing a means of generating reliable renewable electricity from locally sourced sunshine. And now, with Community Choice Aggregation expanding across most of San Diego County's municipalities and Community Shared Solar plus battery storage improving economics significantly, San Diego has presented itself as a premier location for a new style of solar power generation. On the technological level, this may look like rapidly deployable solar systems like 5B's "Maverick" and novel battery architectures using less toxic and more abundant raw materials such as zinc or even carbon (maybe even from captured CO2). Innovations like these could potentially yield some of the cheapest electricity produced in the history of humanity. Our goal is to surpass the 1 cent/kWh threshold in terms of production costs, which in the developed world is near zero marginal cost (if that were the price the consumer is paying), which is a mind boggling concept that few are likely to appreciate right now but is likely to play a significant role in shaping the next century.

Beyond technological advancements, San Diego has the potential to become a hotspot for solar power development. Until recently, San Diego Gas and Electric has operated as the “provider of last resort” for surrounding communities and consumers. However, SDG&E has now made statements to the State’s regulatory authority saying it is looking to transition out of the generation business, as well as exit the energy procurement side of things. We suspect this is in large part due to the movement in San Diego toward a Community Choice Energy model, in which local municipalities will be in charge of negotiating electricity procurement contracts. We think all of this creates a huge opportunity for a local cooperative to get into the electricity generation game.

On Sept 17th, 2019 - San Diego City Council voted 7-2 in favor of joining the Community Choice Energy or Community Choice Aggregate (CCA) program for which the cities of Encinitas, Solana Beach, La Mesa and Chula Vista have already signed up. The program already exists in more than a dozen cities across the state and is modeled on similar public agencies that have displaced their local, investor-owned utility in favor of a public-purchase model.

This, in combination with the decreasing costs of battery storage, and an improved regulatory environment seem to make it a good time to get into the solar development space. That doesn't mean it isn't fraught with risk but we think it's worth a shot.

The location

The Warner Springs Basin in San Diego County CA, as near as possible to the Warner Substation or any of the high capacity lines that go out from it

The design

E-W oriented Maverick system made up of 10,080 solar modules, 6 Sunny Central SC 630MV-11-IT (SMA) inverters, over 100,000 linear feet of copper wire, surrounded by a whole bunch of ecological restoration that is beneficial to both humans and wildlife

The financials

The prospective players involved (no contracts have been signed with anyone yet)

The Developer - initially Corona Enterprises, but we'll need to hire on additional help

The Landowner - the Vista Irrigation District

The Technology provider - 5B

Hardware Suppliers - SMA's Sunny Tripower inverter's, Hanwha's 430 LG-8 solar modules, 

The Financier - the Renewable Energy for America Program, Mission Driven Finance, the online solar support community, San Diego ratepayers

The tricky bits

- Interconnection agreement with SDG&E

- Env. Impact Report and the possibility of having to go through the full (and expensive) CEQA process

- Getting the initial financing to pay for the two previous things plus engineering services/construction documents

The Ecological Regeneration

Our goal is to submit a Mitigated Negative Declaration in order to avoid the full CEQA and environmental impact process. We'll then take those savings and do regenerative work around the solar farm to leave the area far better than we found it.

Background: The Story of Corona Enterprises, LLC

Founded in 2010 during Cody's sophomore year at Duke, this little LLC has had a wild ride. Since that time, we’ve been involved in projects related to regenerative agriculture, sustainable housing, waste, and more. Now we are putting new focus into Energy, the foundation of life on Earth as we know it. More specifically, low-cost, renewable energy that is community managed and owned. But before we get into that, we’d like to tell you a bit about the journey and how we arrived at this point.

Surprisingly enough, this foray into renewable energy began with an adventure in wastewater treatment. Using technology known as an electrogenic bioreactor, and drawing inspiration from those that came before us like Emefcy and Cambrian Innovations, Pilus Energy was working to remove pollutants from water while simultaneously generating electricity and biogas in what scientific literature typically calls a Microbial Fuel Cell.

While this venture ultimately didn't evolve to the larger scale we imagined due to funding drying up, but our journey to produce a more socially beneficial form of energy had begun.

After Pilus, we’ve taken on a variety of projects related to renewable ecosystem management. We constructed an open-source backhoe from basic, off-the-shelf components.

And built several tiny houses to explore small-scale ecological living.

We helped develop branding around novel bio-stimulants that have the potential to speed up nature's normal regenerative processes

We invested in Regenerative Agriculture and its potential for providing material goods to humans while also restoring ecosystem function.

And most recently we managed a CalFire grant initiative to divert end of life trees away from landfills and toward local lumber production. All of these ideas ultimately draw their primary source of energy from the sun, but now, we are turning our attention to solar power more directly because of some exciting changes that are happening in the San Diego electric market.