Southern California Edison (SCE) — one of California’s three major investor owned utilities (IOUs) — is just about finished with construction of a 29,000-panel solar energy plant in Porterville, California that, when completed, should produce enough energy to power 4,300 homes in Porterville each year.

Construction of the plant began in October of this year and, according to ABC News, SCE will have the plant finished before the new year. It will take a bit longer than that for customers to receive energy from the plant, as SCE will run tests on the panels throughout the beginning of January before fully flipping the switch and feeding all of the plant’s energy into the utility’s grid.

At 6.7 megawatts (MW) in capacity, the Porterville plant is one of the largest privately owned solar power plants in the entire state, and it’s the largest ground-mounted solar plant that SCE has created to date. During construction, SCE created jobs in an area where they are sorely needed. According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, California’s unemployment rate was just a hair over 12 percent as of October 2010 — higher than the national average. SCE was also able to temporarily employ 125 workers to hammer in the clean energy plant and is renting land from the city at $70,000 per year.

There’s still a few issues to take care of before testing of the plant begins, including cleanup of working materials and inspection of the plant. A ground-breaking ceremony to fully integrate the Porterville facility into the utility grid will be held in late January or early February of 2011.