Southern California Edison, the utility subsidiary of Rosemead-based Edison International, is part of a joint venture that will build a $503 million, 30-mile high-voltage transmission line from northern Orange County to northern San Diego County.
The contract award was announced May 20 by the California Independent System Operator, or Cal-ISO, as part of a series of new and upgraded transmission lines designed to modernize the grid and increase electricity transmission capacity.
For this contract, Southern California Edison is partnering with Greenwich, Connecticut-based Lotus Infrastructure Partners, which specializes in infrastructure investments in energy and related sectors.
Southern California Edison is one of the nation’s largest electric utilities, serving a population of approximately 15 million via 5 million residential and business customer accounts in a 50,000-square-mile service area in portions of central California and most of Southern California (excluding San Diego County).
To service all those customer accounts, Southern California Edison delivers power across 12,635 miles of transmission lines. Many of those lines are decades old and don’t have the transmission capacity of modern lines. They also don’t connect easily to large scale renewable energy generation projects.
“New transmission in California needs to be built at up to four times historical rates to meet unprecedented new demand for electricity, driven by growth in (electric vehicles), heat pumps, data centers and electrification across the economy,” said Steve Powell, chief executive of the Southern California Edison utility.
“Adding transmission capacity is necessary to ensure the electric system is reliable, resilient and ready to deliver more clean energy when and where it’s needed,” Powell added.
The new $503 million transmission line, expected to go into operation in about a decade, will have a transmission capacity of 500 kilovolts. It will connect two Southern California Edison substations: one in the city of Orange and the other near the shuttered San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in unincorporated northern San Diego County.
Under the joint venture structure for the contract, Lotus Infrastructure will lead the project development. Once regulatory clearance is obtained, Southern California Edison said it will buy the entire project and lease 25% of the transmission capacity to Lotus.
The Southern California Edison-Lotus Infrastructure team was chosen from among four bidding entities for the project.
