Solar Panels at Six of 14 Santa Barbara Unified Sites Generating Nothing but Shade

[Updated: June 4, 2024, 3:54 p.m.]

Many of the Santa Barbara Unified School District’s solar panels are, as of now, purely decorative. They provide shade over the parking lots of six sites, but no power. 

The district does have eight school sites with solar panels on and working, including five elementary schools and three junior highs. However, it has been waiting on final approvals to operationalize the remaining six sites, said Lani Wild, who is on the project team for Engie North America, the contractor that owns and operates the district’s panels. 

The district had bright eyes and good intentions when it first conceived of the solar project back in 2020. It planned for the 14,000 solar panels and six supplementary battery systems across 14 school sites to eventually generate a majority of its power and save nearly $8 million in electricity costs. Not to mention the reduced emissions and security against power outages. 

Following their initial installation in the summer of 2022, all panels were supposed to be operational by now. However, two years later, all three high schools, along with a few other sites, are still waiting to go online.

Four stalled sites — Santa Barbara High, La Cumbre Junior High, District Facilities, and the District Office — are “close to going online,” district spokesperson Ed Zuchelli told the Independent back in February. It should be noted that Engie is responsible for managing the district’s solar panels, not the district itself.

Engie, Zuchelli said, was requesting permission to operate as soon as possible. Typically, Southern California Edison (SCE) provides that permission within one month of request. However, it took longer than expected due to delays from SCE.

This week, though, Engie “figured out whatever was preventing them from moving forward with this project,” said Desmond Ho, the district’s sustainability coordinator. They will begin the commissioning process at the District Office and District Facilities next Monday.

“The commissioning will take one to two weeks, and this is to test out the battery storage system as well as test the microgrid electronics,” Ho said. “We expect that these two systems will be online as soon as the commissioning is complete.”

All six of the stalled sites include these solar microgrids, which require batteries and switchgear equipment that are not involved in the solar-only projects. Those items were impacted by supply chain issues, which were exacerbated by the pandemic and contributed significantly to the delays. Final construction updates were just completed this February.

Dos Pueblos is further stalled due to required electrical upgrades this summer, which would have been significantly more expensive if the panels were connected beforehand, explained Ho. San Marcos stalled because the district could not get “the SCE solar planners based out of the Los Angeles area to respond to a tie-in request.” It only recently received this long-awaited response on Friday, May 31. S.B. High is still waiting on permission to operate from SCE. 

According to Ho, these delays have been widespread — SCE received a large volume of tie-in applications alongside the district’s, which slowed down the process.

David Eisenhauer, an SCE representative, could not divulge much due to “customer confidentiality,” but said they are actively working with the district and their staff to get the panels online, which takes “planning and engineering.” 

“Connection planning is a very involved process, and it can take some time to get connected to the grid,” Eisenhauer said. “The timeline can vary pretty widely, and it depends on the complexity of the project.”

Concerned community members have been disappointed to find that the high school’s solar panels are “only ornamental,” in the words of one Independent reader, especially regarding the perceived costs.

The up-front cost for all sites was about $2 million. That includes $1.2 million in contingency funds, paid for by Engie, plus $800,000 in up-front costs paid by the district for its power purchase agreement — Engie will provide the energy and maintenance for the solar panels at a flat rate of $0.1326 per kWh for 28 years.

However, the district has not incurred any additional costs due to the delays, “beyond the intangibles associated with deferred environmental and resilience benefits,” said Craig Lewis of the Clean Coalition, a Santa Barbara–based environmental firm and partner on the solar project. The district only pays Engie for delivered energy, which happens after projects are operational. 

The district, too, is similarly disappointed. They want the remaining panels to be online as much as anybody else, Zuchelli said this week. Still, in this year alone, they saved 269 tons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere via their operational panels. Monroe Elementary, for one, is generating 100 percent of its own electricity use and then some.

A recent analysis also showed that the district will actually be saving $14 million — versus the originally anticipated $8 million — in electricity costs over the project’s lifetime. To build the same solar array system today, Ho noted, would cost $31 million upfront. The fact that the district’s solar array only cost $2 million, he said, was the deal of a lifetime.

“Once all of the solar panels are online later this year,” Zuchelli assured, “the project is anticipated to provide S.B. Unified with 70 percent of its electricity use.”

Amid the switch to cleaner energy, the district also recently received $5.1 million from the  U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean School Bus Rebate program for 25 new zero-emission school buses. The funds follow on the heels of the district’s new partnership with Zum, a carbon-neutral student transportation company, to bus students to and from school.  

“Zum is committed to working with SBUSD … to develop a plan in the next five years to transition the school bus fleet to electric,” the company said in its February announcement. 

Statewide, schools are being pushed to adapt to cleaner energy and the changing climate. 

For instance, a bill that would require the state to create a master plan for climate-resilient schools — Senate Bill 1182 — passed through the California Senate this May. The bill would direct and support schools to adapt their facilities and operations to align with the state’s “climate adaptation, decarbonization, and extreme heat goals,” including incentives for clean energy upgrades. 

Nationally, the United States exceeded five million solar installations this month, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA). According to data from SEIA and Wood Mackenzie, more than half of all U.S. solar installations have come online since the start of 2020. California, with two million solar installations, is leading the nation.

The five-million milestone comes only eight years after reaching the one-million mark in 2016, which took 40 years to achieve following the first grid-connected solar installation in 1973. 

The community can hope that all of Santa Barbara Unified’s panels will soon be online to join the growing grid.