From Outages to Opportunities 

Building Consensus: Gaining Community, District, and School Support

Santa Barbara Unified School District has 21 schools, and about 12,500 students, and is considered a large school district compared to other California districts. It is located on the central California coast along the Santa Barbara and Goleta coastline. 61% of students receive Free and Reduced Meals, 68% of students are students of color, and 17% of students are English learners. 18 of the 24 schools are Title 1. In 2018, they passed a Climate Change Action Resolution, and 2 schools have participated in the Green Ribbon Schools Program.

This project was initiated by an elected Board Member for SBUSD’s Board, who was a big proponent of sustainability and concerned about Santa Barbara’s transmission vulnerability given its geographic location. In 2018-2019, SBUSD decided to hire Sage Clean Energy Consulting to do a feasibility study for 21 SBUSD school sites and central facilities for a microgrid system, which outlined how a collaboration with the Clean Coalition’s technical expertise could work to secure a PPA agreement. Board Member Laura Capps and then Superintendent Matsuoka worked with Craig Lewis at the Clean Coalition, along with SBUSD’s director of facilities, and in May 2020 they released a request for proposals (RFP) for 14 sites. In September, SBUSD selected the winning proposal, from Engie, which the SBUSD Board approved in a unanimous vote on September 22. Engie built, owns, and operates solar and microgrid systems.

In the initial study, the PPA rate for kilowatt (kW) was going to be more expensive for the first two years of operations and slated to break even with utility rates sometime around 2022. However, in the RFP, it was spelled out that the PPA rate is to be non-escalating along with a performance guarantee. Therefore, it provided SBUSD’s decision-makers a guaranteed savings of $7.1M over 28 years. More importantly, it provides the District with a known cost to project out for the next 28 years as electricity usage does not change much and the rate will be fixed. Another important component of SBUSD’s decision-making was a lack of capital the District needed to invest. As part of the negotiations with Engie, it was established that they would use a higher per kW rate in exchange for $1.2M cash to be used as a contingency fund. This fund is to be used for legal costs and construction change orders, further reducing any cash that the District has to pay. 

With significant Board interest in reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, spikes in natural gas costs, and the State of California’s move towards electrification, SBUSD anticipated more electrical load moving forward as they slowly electrified their facilities so they opted to build larger arrays that covered anywhere between 80-100% of the respective site’s needs. Projects such as the conversion of natural gas water heaters to electric heat pump water heaters, natural gas furnaces to electric heat pumps, and the installation of EV charging stations signal to the school sites as well as the District that the electrification process is happening.

Turning Vision into Reality: Implementation Phase

One of the big innovations from this project was the smart microgrid with specifications for how to tier the loads such that the most critical loads can be served indefinitely by the renewable solar + storage microgrids, with the other loads served based on priority and energy availability. SBUSD decided to tier loads into three categories:

Tier 1: Mission-critical, life-sustaining loads that warrant 100% resilience. At the SBUSD, Tier 1 loads are freezers and refrigerators, so that these loads can be kept operational 100% of the time and during grid outages of any duration.

Tier 2: Priority loads that should be maintained as long as doing so does not threaten the ability to maintain Tier 1 loads. At SBUSD, Tier 2 loads include communications systems, like internet and phone, and emergency staging facilities, including emergency shelters. The RFP specifies that during grid outages, Tier 2 loads must be kept online at least 80% of the time.

Tier 3: “Everything else” – Discretionary loads that should be maintained only when doing so does not threaten Tier 1 and Tier 2 resilience. At SBUSD, during grid outages of any duration, Tier 3 loads are anticipated to be kept online approximately 25% of the time.

Once the PPA was signed with Engie, construction began in October 2021. 

During this phase, it was also important to maintain open communication with key players like the school cabinet, director of facilities and maintenance teams, and legal counsel, to name a few. Making sure that everyone is kept in the loop with how construction is going and any concerns that are arising was critical in smoothing out hiccups or dealing with any changes that arose. Finally, having everything in writing during this phase ensured that decisions could withstand changes in personnel or changes on the board.

Sustaining Success: Maintenance and Ongoing Support

Because Engie owns the equipment, they also maintain and operate it. And, because of the guaranteed savings they pay SBUSD, they have incentive to keep the equipment operating at peak capacity. For example, when an inverter malfunctions, they come to replace it. SBUSD still has some energy efficiency work to do on some campuses, like transitioning to LED lighting or securing the building envelope, which will boost the total capacity served by the solar and storage systems to more than 90% of total consumption.

Today, there are new financial incentives—and some disincentives—for installing a system like this, and the landscape is always changing. So it’s important to stay on top of broader policy changes and to be proactive. A new incentive is from the federal Inflation Reduction Act, which provides tax credits up to 50% back on certain clean energy technologies. But making sure the contractors and financiers know about these programs and can help you leverage new incentives is important. 

Recently, the utility company, Southern California Edison (SCE), in Santa Barbara wanted SBUSD to pay for grid upgrades and for SCE to monitor the upgrades. So it’s important to stay on top of those kinds of new requests and to leverage relationships with state legislative representatives who can help fight these incoming requests.

And, with the California Public Utility Commission’s move to a different schema for how they compensate excess generation from solar panels (NEM3), solar exports from panels back to the grid are not very valuable, so it’s important to find ways (like battery storage) to make use of all the solar energy you generate.

Lessons Learned & Next Steps 

Lessons Learned

• Microgrids are very important for resilience. Smartly design the system to ensure that all critical loads can be served indefinitely by solar and storage systems.

• Microgrids can save the district millions of dollars by helping to offset peak demand charges—not to mention the financial savings associated with resilience itself. 

• Provide opportunities to include stakeholders in the decision-making process, and make participation easy. For example, present a school site principal with 2 or 3 options for where solar panels could be sited, and let them make the final decision. This will be more agreeable than giving them a fully-baked plan and far more effective than letting them design the project entirely. In this vein, teachers, administrators, and district personnel come and go, so it’s important to keep track of the decisions that get made, when, and by whom—in writing.

• RFP and selecting a contractor: it’s important to look for a turnkey solution when contracting for a PPA. If you want to own the equipment outright, there would be other considerations for contracting and maintaining a system like this.

Next Steps

SBUSD is starting to integrate its microgrid into the student learning experience, though this is something they want to improve upon over time. As of now, teachers are able to download the solar panel data in 15-minute intervals for use in their classrooms. During the 2024 solar eclipse, for example, students were able to see how much less solar energy was generated. In the future, SBUSD would like to provide students with data to understand how shift loading works, to better understand what the large energy uses are at schools, and what students and staff can do to reduce their energy use.