License plate tracking

I saw this from the wall street journal and found it be quite disturbing, if you care to read the article in full.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443995604578004723603576296.html

Subject: License plate tracking

For more than two years, the police in San Leandro, Calif., photographed Mike Katz-Lacabe's Toyota Tercel almost weekly. They have shots of it cruising along Estudillo Avenue near the library, parked at his friend's house and near a coffee shop he likes. In one case, they snapped a photo of him and his two daughters getting out of a car in his driveway.

Mr. Katz-Lacabe isn't charged with, or suspected of, any crime. Local police are tracking his vehicle automatically, using cameras mounted on a patrol car that record every nearby vehicle—license plate, time and location.

"Why are they keeping all this data?" says Mr. Katz-Lacabe, who obtained the photos of his car through a public-records request. "I've done nothing wrong."

Until recently it was far too expensive for police to track the locations of innocent people such as Mr. Katz-Lacabe. But as surveillance technologies decline in cost and grow in sophistication, police are rapidly adopting them. Private companies are joining, too. At least two start-up companies, both founded by "repo men"—specialists in repossessing cars or property from deadbeats—are currently deploying camera-equipped cars nationwide to photograph people's license plates, hoping to profit from the data they collect.

The rise of license-plate tracking is a case study in how storing and studying people's everyday activities, even the seemingly mundane, has become the default rather than the exception. Cellphone-location data, online searches, credit-card purchases, social-network comments and more are gathered, mixed-and-matched, and stored in vast databases.

Is Your Car Being Tracked?

• Check if Riverside County Has Scanned Your Plates
• How the Wall Street Journal Obtained the License Plate Data

Data about a typical American is collected in more than 20 different ways during everyday activities, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. Fifteen years ago, more than half of these types of surveillance tools were unavailable or not in widespread use, says Col. Lisa Shay, a professor of electrical engineering at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point who studies tracking.

"What would the 1950s Soviet Union have done with the technology we have now?" says Col. Shay. "We don't have a police state in this country, but we have the technology."

Law-enforcement agents say they are using this information only to catch bad guys.

During the past five years, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has distributed more than $50 million in federal grants to law-enforcement agencies—ranging from sprawling Los Angeles to little Crisp County, Ga., pop. 23,000—for automated license-plate recognition systems. A 2010 study estimates that more than a third of large U.S. police agencies use automated plate-reading systems.

The information captured is considerable. Through a public-records act request, The Journal obtained two years' worth of plate information from the Riverside County Sheriff's Department in California. From Sept. 10, 2010, to Aug. 27, 2012, the sheriff's cameras captured about 6 million license-plate scans.

The sheriff's 49 camera-equipped vehicles scanned about 2 million unique plates. The average plate in the database was scanned three times over the two-year period. Less than 1% of plates were tracked extensively—hundreds of times, and occasionally thousands.

First Amendment Issues

A report by the International Association of Chiefs of Police warns that "recording driving habits" could raise First Amendment concerns. It noted that plate readers might record "vehicles parked at addiction-counseling meetings, doctors' offices, health clinics, or even staging areas for political protests." The association urged members to consider establishing "more specific criteria for granting access" to the information and to designate it only for "official use."

The Surveillance Economy

View Interactive

License-plate databases contain revealing information about people's locations. Police can generally obtain it without a judge's approval. By comparison, prosecutors typically get a court order to install GPS trackers on people's cars or to track people's location via cellphone.

License-plate databases don't contain names and addresses of vehicle owners, although that information is available from separate state Department of Motor Vehicle databases. The Driver's Privacy Protection Act, passed in 1994 to thwart stalkers, limits public access to the DMV's information but nevertheless allows car owners' names and addresses to be obtained by government agencies, police, private investigators, insurers, researchers, private toll operators and, in some states, journalists. The data is still sometimes subject to abuse.

In 1998, for instance, a police lieutenant in Washington, D.C., pleaded guilty to extortion after looking up the plates of vehicles near a gay bar and blackmailing the vehicle owners.

Enlarge Image

Araby Williams/The Wall Street Journal

A license-plate-reading camera

'Nationwide Vision'

"I'm terrified that someone could get hurt because of this data," says Mike Griffin, a Baltimore auto repossession agent who uses his own fleet of camera-equipped cars to collect about a million plates a month.

Mr. Griffin says he takes extensive security measures with the data, which he contributes to a private national database.

These private databases, each containing hundreds of millions of plates, could become the largest collection of people's movements within the U.S., says Mary Ellen Callahan, former chief privacy officer for the Department of Homeland Security. "You could have a nationwide vision of where I was at a given time," says Ms. Callahan, who now runs the privacy practice at law firm Jenner & Block.

Law-enforcement officers say they use the technology to track down stolen cars, collect unpaid tickets and identify the vehicles of suspected criminals.

The two private plate-tracking companies identified by the Journal both say they act responsibly and are within their rights to collect the data. Scott A. Jackson, founder of MVConnect LLC, the parent company of one of the two firms, says he won't sell the data to the public or to marketers.

He says the plate trackers are simply shooting video in public, something that is perfectly legal. "I take absolute exception to any government telling me that I can't go into public and take video," Mr. Jackson says. "That's taking my freedoms away." He estimates his company has snapped "hundreds of millions" of photos of plates nationwide.

License-plate readers spread in the late 1960s, when film cameras were installed at some intersections to identify red-light runners. Since then, the cameras, software and computer storage have improved, and prices have fallen. This makes storing and working with large license-plate photo databases affordable and realistic.

The price of one gigabyte of storage fell to $1.68 this year from $18.95 in 2005, a decline of 91%, according to market-research firm IDC. It is expected to cost just pennies in a few years. Similarly, digital cameras and the software that can "read" letters and numbers from photos are improving dramatically.

Italian defense contractor Finmeccanica SpA introduced plate-recognition cameras to the U.S. in 2004 via its subsidiary, Elsag North America. The technology originally was used to sort mail by reading addresses. Today, a standard two-camera system mounted on a police car costs $15,000, down from $25,000 originally, says Mark Windover, Elsag's chief executive.

Rapid Adoption

Cynthia Lum, a professor at George Mason University, did a study in 2010 estimating that about 37% of large police departments were using plate readers. "It's one of the most rapidly diffusing technologies that I've ever seen," says Ms. Lum, a former police officer and deputy director of the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy.

Three Years of WSJ Privacy Insights

The Wall Street Journal is conducting a long-running investigation into the transformation of personal privacy in America.

Selected findings:

• Google bypassed the privacy settings on millions of Web browsers on Apple iPhones and computers— tracking the online activities of people who intended that kind of monitoring to be blocked. (2/17/12)
• The government follows the movements of thousands of Americans a year by secretly monitoring their cellphone records . (9/9/11)
• iPhone and Android apps secretly shared dataabout their users, a Journal investigation found.(12/10/10)
• Top apps on Facebook transmit personal identifying details to tracking companies, a Journal investigation found. (10/18/10)
• One of the fastest growing online businessesis that of spying on Americans as they browse the Web. (6/30/10)
• Plus, the global surveillance bazaar , a secretive phone-tracking "stingray" and RapLeaf's clever way of figuring out Web surfers' real names .
• See full privacy coverage

A few states have guidelines for using the scanners. New Hampshire bans them. Maine requires data to be purged after 21 days unless it is part of an investigation. New Jersey requires officers to have "specific and articulable facts" of "possible criminal or terrorist activity" before looking up a car owner.

Some towns have turned down the systems. "It went beyond my sense of what we needed to do to make us safer," says Neil Fulton, the town manager of Norwich, Vt., pop. 3,414, which rejected a grant for a plate reader in April.

But many departments embrace the technology. The sheriff's department in Riverside County, Calif., which is home to about 2.2 million people, has been using automated plate readers since 2007. According to Riverside County Sheriff's Department Sgt. Lisa McConnell, "The database is available to any of our officers in the furtherance of their professional duties." The department intends to keep the records indefinitely, she says.

The Journal obtained the database (minus each car's location) through a public records act request. The tracking system isn't perfect. "It picks up any words on a reflective background," says Gary Schreiner, a technician at the sheriff's department.

As a result, some common road signs show up in the database. "ONEWAY" appears 13,873 times. In addition, some of the most-tracked plates were other government vehicles, which are identifiable by their special tags in California.

Some Riverside County residents voiced surprise that their plates are being captured. "Not knowing about it makes me feel a little uneasy," says Virginia Rose, an 86-year-old resident of Idyllwild. Her plate appears in the database four times.

Still, she said she figured it was helpful for the police. "Usually I go along with whatever police enforcement needs to do to keep us safe, so I figure they must have people stealing cars and that sort of thing," she says.

Officers can also tap private license-plate location databases such as the two being built by former repossession agents, Digital Recognition Network Inc. of Fort Worth, Texas, and MVTrac of Palatine, Ill., a unit of MVConnect.

MVTrac's Mr. Jackson, spent more than 20 years in the repossession business, says that at first he saw plate readers simply as a way to help find cars he was trying to repossess. Then he realized the opportunity to build a national network.

He began installing cameras on the vehicles of other auto-recovery agents, who pay subscription fees to use the cameras. MVTrac says hundreds of its systems are operating nationwide. The camera systems give drivers an instant alert when they scan a car wanted for repossession. The alert doesn't include the owner's identity. Agents also get a commission when a finance company buys data about a plate they scanned.

Enlarge Image

Brian L. Frank for The Wall Street Journal

Local police kept a sizable file on the locations of Mike Katz-Lacabe's cars, above, using license-plate-reading camera.

'Night Spotters'

One of MVTrac's biggest customers is Mr. Griffin in Baltimore, whose company, Final Notice & Recovery LLC, has plate-recognition systems on 10 vehicles. Mr. Griffin employs drivers working two shifts, day and night, driving each car 300 to 400 miles a day, scanning plates in the Baltimore and Washington, D.C., areas.

A retired Baltimore police officer, Patrick Wilson, leads Final Notice's team of "night spotters," who drive after dark, scanning plates. Their black vehicles have tinted windows and hood-mounted cameras. They canvas alleys, parking lots and apartment complexes to scan as many vehicles as possible.

When the night spotters find a car wanted for repossession, they call in a tow truck. They can now repossess about 15 cars a night, Mr. Wilson says, up from about six per night before using the technology.

Missing Persons

Final Notice has amassed a database of 19 million historical locations of vehicles in and around Maryland and Washington. Mr. Griffin provides police free access to location information about vehicles in stolen-car or missing-person cases, among others, he says.

Soon he hopes to start selling access to his plate data to bail bondsmen, process servers, private investigators and insurers. "In the next five years, I hope my primary business will be data gathering," he says.

The plates scanned by people such as Mr. Griffin are contributed to Mr. Jackson's central MVTrac database. Mr. Jackson declined to be specific about the total number of scans in the database, but says, "We have [photographs of] a large majority" of registered vehicles in the U.S.

Until recently, rival company Vigilant Solutions, a subsidiary of Digital Recognition Network, provided a counter on its website tallying its plate-scanning database. The latest read: about 700 million scans.

DRN says on its website that it can "combine automotive data such as where millions of people drive their cars…with household income and other valuable information" so companies can "pinpoint consumers more effectively." DRN declined to comment.

Mr. Jackson says he hasn't decided what to do with his database but will be guided by the 1994 federal law governing access to drivers' personal data. "We're not going to allow somebody to access the data to track a girlfriend, track a wife," he says.

Instead, he says he is more likely to use it to help officers track down fugitives, execute warrants and collect parking tickets. He says he is in no rush to sell the data. "Every day it just gets more valuable because we collect more information."

Enlarge Image

Araby Williams/The Wall Street Journal

Luke Smith of MVTrac, a plate-tracking start-up company founded by a 'repo man.'

Battle Over a Bill

This year California State Sen. Joe Simitian introduced legislation to limit retention of automatic plate-recognition records by private contractors to 60 days and require officers to have a warrant to access the data.

Sen. Simitian argued the police should have probable cause to get information about the location of people's cars. "Should a cop who thinks you're cute have access to your daily movements for the past 10 years without your knowledge or consent?" he says. "I think the answer to that question should be 'no.'"

Private companies and law-enforcement agencies vehemently opposed the bill, saying it would create an "overwhelming burden" on police departments and would cut into revenue from unpaid parking tickets. Mr. Simitian eventually abandoned his legislation.

The tracking of innocent people's license plates bothers people like Mr. Katz-Lacabe, a computer security consultant in San Leandro. He heard about the technology at a city council meeting there.

In 2010, Mr. Katz-Lacabe filed a California Public Records Act request for his data from the local police. He received a report containing 112 images of his vehicles dating to 2008. The file contained 107 photos of his Tercel and five of his Toyota Prius, which he says is driven less frequently.

"I was surprised there were some pictures where I could actually identify people," Mr. Katz-Lacabe says, looking at the images. "Here's one where I'm driving. Here's me in my Cal shirt."

San Leandro, with a population of about 85,000, had one Federal Signal license-plate reader installed on a police car in 2008 and installed a newer, better one this year, says Police Chief Sandra Spagnoli. She says the technology has helped locate hundreds of stolen cars and solve other crimes.

Recently, she says, a homicide suspect from Las Vegas drove through town—and the scanner spotted his plate. "He took us on a pursuit, and we caught him," she says. "We would not have been able to do that without that system."

Her department plans to retain the data indefinitely, Ms. Spagnoli says. "It's irresponsible if you have something that could solve a crime in the future, and you've dumped it."

Related Reading

• Is Your License Plate Being Tracked?
• The Economics of Surveillance
• How the Wall Street Journal Obtained the License Plate Data
• WSJ Privacy Reporting: Full Coverage

Write to Julia Angwin at julia.angwin@wsj.com and Jennifer Valentino-DeVries atJennifer.Valentino-DeVries@wsj.com

A version of this article appearedSeptember 29, 2012, on page A1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: New Tracking Frontier: Your License Plates.

In California everything goes

While driving around I noticed this piece of junk & at first I thought

it was a camper shell made into a trailer.

Then I noticed its a 5th wheeler converted into a trailer. It just seams

California has no shame as to what they allow on the road

Below the neighbor who is in endless foreclosure abuse, just piles their trash in the street. Here is how to do it & get away with it too !!!!

Step 1. First borrow about $700,000 for your duplex dump for the bank in 2006. 
Step 2. Default on the loan in 2006. 
Step 3. Turn the duplex into a illegal 6 plex with extreme sub standard conditions.
Step 4. Rent out 6 units to every low life crackhead & sell lots of dope.
Step 5. Attract attention of Code Enforcement & Police
Step 6. Have Code enforcement fine your $500+ per day - works great if your - $500k on your loan. 
Step 7. Once you wrack up $200k+ in Code Enforcement fines to go with your -$500k negative equity - bank no longer has desire to foreclose under any circumstances. 

Step 8. Spread your ideas to the other neighbors houses.

Step 9. Live free & clear of any government intervention as they would now have to spend $100k to condemn & bulldoze your house and maybe $150k to relocate the poor crack- heads into new Gov subsidized low income housing, money none of which they have because of the overtime required to handle cases like this.

Update Oct 1:
Just this morning I received a call from the local Code Enforcement Inspector who was calling all the people on the street telling them that the city council will hold a hearing on this case Oct 11 at 6:30pm in the city council chambers. So here is the COMPLETE- JOKE - after all this time they still have not even racked up $10,000 in fines. The city council will decide if they approve increasing the fines to $100 per day.....OH that will really scare them as they already own the bank $700,000 plus interest in unpaid loans. Long story short - in another year when the fines reach over $25,000 then the case will be referred to the "CITY ATTORNEYs office" for more vigorous prosecution of placing a lien against their property. Currently there is one case where the owner actually owns the property and the case is ongoing for more then 10 years. In this case the owner tried to refinance and after some more vigorous negotiation with the city attorneys office - they reduced the fines 50% with the agreement the owner would sell the property. Now 10 years....thats FAST SERVICE !!!

When I asked why: The city would just not condemn the place and turn off the water & gas , I was told the inspector tried - but his bosses refused. The most simple solution is never possible.

Below you can see an illegal side addition - in the side set back zone & 

also a illegal 2nd story addition, 

along with 20 people who live in the house.

Its spreading to the other neighbors house

Now this has been ongoing for 18 months, for those of you who say this is not possible.

Mirror, Mirror on the wall.... Please let SOLAR save us all

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-bigsolar-20120921,0,4991127,full.story


Taxpayers, ratepayers will fund California solar plants
A new breed of prospectors -- banks, insurers, utility companies -- are receiving billions in subsidies while taxpayer and ratepayers are paying most of the costs. Critics say it's a rip-off.



One of three solar receivers stands 459 feet above the floor of the Mojave Desert in California's Ivanpah Valley at BrightSource Energy's Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating Station. The facility will eventually generate 392 megawatts of electricity, serving about 140,000 homes. (Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times / August 8, 2012)


By Evan Halper, Ralph Vartabedian and Julie Cart, Los Angeles Times
September 20, 2012, 5:08 p.m.
Driven by the Obama administration's vision of clean power and energy independence, the rush to build large-scale solar plants across the Southwest has created an investors' dream in the desert.

Taxpayers have poured tens of billions of dollars into solar projects — some of which will have all their construction and development costs financed by the government by the time they start producing power.

Banks, insurers and utility companies have jumped in, taking advantage of complex state and federal tax incentives to reap outsized returns. Among the solar prospectors in the Mojave are investor Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc.,General Electric, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Morgan Stanley and technology giant Google Inc.

The cost for decades to come will also be borne by ratepayers. Confidential agreements between solar developers and utilities lock in power prices two to four times the cost of conventional electricity. The power generated by the mega-plants will be among the most expensive renewable energy in the country.

That high-priced power will compose an increasing share of California's electricity following Gov. Jerry Brown's signing last year of legislation requiring that renewable sources provide 33% of the state's power by 2020.

Stanford University economist Frank Wolak, an expert in the California electricity market, said the state's renewable energy strategy could boost electricity rates 10% to 20%, depending on a number of factors. Potentially, consumers' bills could go up by 50%.

"It is easily in the billions of dollars," he said.

Government and solar officials say the subsidies are no different from long-standing federal support for the oil, gas and nuclear industries. They say generous incentives are necessary to incubate the fledgling renewables industry.

"We are driving clean energy projects that would otherwise not have gotten built at a commercial scale with innovative technology," said Daniel Poneman, deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy.

Energy Department officials say solar energy prices will fall as the industry matures, and the cost of power from future conventional plants will be higher.

Critics, however, say that despite the righteous goal of combating climate change, solar entrepreneurs are getting too much government money.

"What's happening in California is a tragedy, on every front," said Bill Powers, a San Diego-based electrical engineer and power plant consultant to government, nonprofits and developers. "It's a huge waste of money…. I see a lot of this as just an old fashioned rip-off."

The lure of outsized profits has set off a solar frenzy in California, with dozens of projects planned from Barstow to Blythe, from Inyo County's high desert to the Sand Hills in Imperial County.

The spark has been the renewable energy program begun by former President George W. Bush and expanded under President Obama.

The incentives allow solar developers to reap annual returns on their investments of 8% to 12%, as much as tripling their money in a decade. In some cases the returns could go as high as 17%, according to Lee J. Peterson, an Atlanta-based tax attorney at the Reznick Group.

"Banks and Wall Street are trying to outdo one another with green commitments," said Michel Di Capua, a renewable power analyst with Bloomberg New Energy Finance. "It looks good from an environmental perspective. But it is also very profitable."

To make such projects economically attractive for developers, the government created a mix of federal loan guarantees, grants and tax incentives — and threw in the cheap use of millions of acres of public land for power plants.

Taken together, the incentives can provide solar companies with more than half a project's costs in cash, with the remainder covered by the federally guaranteed loans.

The cash grants, approved as part of the 2009 economic stimulus package, provided renewable-energy developers 30% of the cost of a project once it is finished. More than $13 billion has been distributed. The grants are no longer offered. They have been replaced by a tax credit of equal value.

The most complex piece is a tax policy that allowed companies to deduct in one year the entire cost of a project from their taxable income. The program was changed this year, requiring the cost be deducted over five years.

The low-interest, government-guaranteed loans — more than $16 billion for renewable energy projects so far — pay up to 80% of a project's construction costs.

"If this were a modern-day fairy tale — and in many respects it is — solar developers would be saying, 'Mirror, mirror on the ground, look at all the money I found!' " said one county official, who did not want to be identified because of pending negotiations with a solar developer.

One of the biggest solar projects in the world is now rising in the California desert just off Interstate 15 near the Nevada border.

The $2.2-billion Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System is being built by Oakland-based BrightSource Energy Inc. on 3,500 acres of public land.

Spread across a dry lake bed will be 173,500 mirrors, each the size of a garage door. Eventually 6 square miles will be covered with three fields of gleaming mirrors, each aimed at a 459-foot tower.

The sun's power will be focused on a boiler in each tower, heating water to 1,000 degrees to create steam to drive turbines. When completed, the plant is expected to produce 370 megawatts, enough to power about 140,000 homes.

Joe Desmond, a senior vice president at BrightSource, said the tower design allows Ivanpah to produce more electricity during high demand periods later in the day compared to other technologies, such as photovoltaic panels. Still, the Ivanpah design has never been proven on a large scale.

The Ivanpah plant was made possible by government-backed loans at low rates — 4% to 4.2%. BrightSource and its corporate investors will receive about $600 million in federal grants once the plant starts producing.

The project's investors, which include New Jersey-based NRG Energy Inc. and Google, also will be able to share a federal tax reduction of an estimated $600 million to $700 million over five years under the government's tax break.

Even renewable-energy advocates, such as the Bay Area-based Climate Policy Initiative, acknowledge that the nation's first forays into utility-scale solar plants will be expensive.

The group estimates that 43 cents of every dollar of energy produced by the Ivanpah facility will be paid for by taxpayers.

BrightSource Chief Executive John Woolard said the company isn't looking for "persistent large subsidies" but isn't ready to operate without them. "You want to diminish them over time, but you don't want to fall off a cliff," Woolard said.

The developers and investors will continue making money on the project thanks to a long-term power agreement with Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric Co.

The California Public Utilities Commission, which approves all rate agreements, won't disclose the rate for Ivanpah or any solar plant because it is considered a trade secret.

But outside experts, including Wolak, the Stanford economist, estimate that Ivanpah power is priced at $90 to $130 per megawatt hour — three to four times the cost of electricity in the state last year.

BrightSource declined to specify the price but said it was in line with the PUC's recommended renewable rate of $129 per megawatt hour.

The PUC has approved virtually every long-term contract for renewable energy that has come before it, driven in part by the state's renewable energy goals. The commission has greenlighted all but two of 184 green-energy proposals since 2002, including a plan by Pacific Gas & Electric to buy solar power generated in outer space.

The state Division of Ratepayer Advocates, whose purpose is to represent consumers, concluded in a report last year that the power contracts the PUC has been approving have put consumers on the hook for $6 billion in excess costs.

"What the commission's practice has been is not to consider the cost of renewable power but to approve every renewable project that came before them," said Joe Como, acting director of the division. "We really spent too much money. It's frustrating as hell."

A PUC member broke the secrecy about rates at a public meeting last November. Michael Florio, a longtime consumer advocate appointed to the commission last year, revealed that the price of energy from the Abengoa Mojave Solar Project near Barstow would cost ratepayers at least $1.25 billion more over 25 years.

Even by the inflated standards of current power purchase agreements, the Abengoa contract stands out — about $200 per megawatt hour, said Powers, the San Diego-based power consultant.

"We have plenty of time to obtain less expensive, readily available renewable energy from other sources," Florio said.

PUC staff presented the commissioners with two options: Either pull the plug on Abengoa or renegotiate the contract with more favorable terms for ratepayers.

But commission President Michael Peevy, a former president of Edison International and Southern California Edison, pressed for approving the contract, arguing that changing the terms could jeopardize the project's federal loan.

"While it is true Mojave Solar is more expensive, this project has positive attributes not reflected on a price-by-price comparison," Peevy said.

Among the benefits cited by Peevy and his colleagues were the 800 construction jobs and 60 permanent jobs that would come with the solar plant.

Peevy's resolution passed by a 4-1 margin.

Although they will pay higher rates for solar power, California's utilities are poised for huge rewards by building thousands of miles of transmission lines to far-flung solar sites.

The state allows big power companies to bill ratepayers for every dollar they plow into building transmission lines, at a guaranteed annual rate of 11% for 40 years.

Powers estimated the cost of new transmission lines to reach remote solar and wind power plants could exceed $15 billion statewide in the next decade. Upgrading existing transmission lines would add billions more, he said.

The transmission upgrades and new lines for the Ivanpah project carry a price tag of $400 million.

"The utilities are thinking, 'How could we morph this thing into a … infrastructure boondoggle for our company?' " Powers said. "This is the answer — remote solar projects."

evan.halper@latimes.com

ralph.vartabedian@latimes.com

julie.cart@latimes.com