A plan to slash the Gilroy school district’s energy bill dimmed slightly when officials discovered the price to repave the sprawling Gilroy High School parking lot will be more than expected.
But the Gilroy Unified School District still is on pace to shave upwards of $10 million in power costs over the next 20 years, beginning with the installation of solar panels over parking lots at four schools, slated to plug into the power grid by the start of the 2016-17 school year.
In the deal, the largest of the lots, at Gilroy High School on 10th Street, will get a $1.3 million repaving facelift with all costs paid by renewable energy company SunEdison as part of the deal.
The district hired SunEdison last September to install Gilroy’s first school-site solar power generating systems at GHS, Christopher High School and Brownell and South Valley middle schools.
Four months after signing the deal, however, district officials realized that SunEdison had failed to factor in essential work required for the best repaving job at GHS—or its cost.
“We had thought [SunEdison] had included [those elements], but they didn’t,” Superintendent Debbie Flores said Monday. “If they had done it properly the first time,” she said, adjustments made at the school board’s Jan. 28 meeting would not have been needed.
Indeed, assistant superintendent and chief business officer Alvaro Meza told the Dispatch on Tuesday that if SunEdison had factored in all the costs of the repaving job, the savings in energy bills for the first year of operations would have been $168,892.
Instead, SunEdison projected energy savings of $215,654 when they sold their services to the district.
The lower figure represents a difference of $46,762, but it’s not a loss, district officials said, because the higher figure did not factor in the added cost of additional services later determined to be necessary to insure the highest standards of work.
Absent from the initial price of the repaving job were the costs of architects, engineers and geotechnical services, among others, to deal with severe drainage problems at the existing GHS parking lot, a total of $102,776, according to school officials.
If the chronic drainage problem at the lot off Princevalle Street went uncorrected, Flores said, it could undermine the entire solar installation at GHS.
The large solar arrays that will be installed at parking lots at the four schools gather the sun’s energy and convert it to electricity. Some of the electricity will be used by the schools and the unused portion will be sold back to PG&E.
The arrays will also offer acres of shaded parking for students, teachers and staff, give protection from rain and offer LED-lighting for security at night.
The cost of installing the more than 135,000 square feet of solar modules and maintenance of the system will be borne by SunEdison.
Under California utility laws, such systems can sell power to PG&E. In Gilroy’s case, SunEdison representative Brian Taylor said at the GUSD board of trustees meeting Sept. 3 that the district will be able to sell excess electricity at 30 cents per kilowatt-hour and buy when necessary at 7 cents per kilowatt-hour.
First-year savings are now estimated at $168,892 and, under the deal, the school district’s electricity costs cannot increase for 20 years.
The schools and their 20-year cost savings are as follows: CHS, $4.2 million; GHS, $3.1 million; Brownell, $1.4 million; and South Valley, $1.8 million.
Other schools were not included mostly because their parking lot areas are too small to make systems efficient.
