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Officials with the San Ramon Valley Unified School District are poised to move ahead with a large scale solar project affecting as many as eight of its schools. At a Nov. 19 workshop, members of the SRVUSD Board of Trustees approved the issuance of $25 million in bonds through the Joint Powers Financing Authority, a move that leaves the district with the ability to move forward but still not committed to the project.
The SRVUSD is one of several districts in California chosen to have access to the Qualified School Construction Bond program. Under the program they are able to receive up to $25 million in bonds at a low interest rate. The bonds must be used within a relatively short period of time and be utilized for local construction.
School board members are looking at the possibility of putting in solar structures at several schools as a means of saving money, reducing the district’s dependence on PG&E for power, and achieving a smaller carbon footprint.
District Bond Counsel John Hartenstein spoke to the Board of Trustees at the workshop, giving an update on the bond situation and explaining what entering into the agreement with the JPFA would do.
“The action here is an authorization and nothing is done until the bonds are sold,” he explained. “This is enabling the finance piece of the solar projects.”
Hartenstein said that approving the bonding mechanisms does not mean that the board is committed to the project, nor does it mean that the board could not decide to back out of the plan when the issue comes up for a vote at their Dec. 15 meeting.
Superintendent Steve Enoch said that having the bonding authority in place is a necessary step in the process.
“What we have in front of you are a number of technical items that the board will need to address if we’re to stay on a schedule,” he said.
The board must make a decision on whether to seek the QCSB bonds by Dec. 31, so having the bonding authority will allow them to make that decision Dec. 15 and if necessary, move forward within the given time frame.
Several parents, supporters of the solar plan, attended the workshop and addressed the board. Parent Lisa Mason said that she is very much in favor of solar, but she urged the trustees to be certain they do their homework and make sure the project will work out as planned.
“If it doesn’t ‘pencil out,’ I don’t think you should do it,” Mason said. “On the flip side I think the solar project could be a great wonderful opportunity for the district. We’re in a sweet spot, with the cost of construction, PG&E rates and rebates.”
She added, “While I do want you to be cautious I’d hate for you to look back and say ‘We missed a great opportunity to improve the district.'”
Trustee Paul Gardner agreed. “My feelings are two-fold. I’m concerned about the risk we’re putting on the general fund, but I’m also feeling like we can’t afford not to put some solar in,” he said. “I think it’s a great opportunity, but it’s got some risk to it. We need to be very careful as to who we go with. Bottom line is, I don’t think we can afford to do nothing.”
Board members approved the actions unanimously.
Officials will continue to look at the available solar options and are expected to make a decision on the QCSB program and the solar plan at their Dec. 15 meeting.
Most of those clowns have no idea what a carbon foot is…More Al Gore BS.
And also dear clowns, you are making an enormous mistake…Solar Power…more automaton thinking. Spend $25,000,000.00 and in 5 years when the light-bulb goes in your head…spend 5,000,000.00 to remove the mess you created.
It only sounds warm and comfortable and the right thing to do, but it’s NOT.
You and every other Greeny (I know it’s not a real word) is being sold a bunch of BS. But you’re sleeping good at night and making those green contractor’s richer.
Bye for now, But I’ll be back…Julia, form Beautiful Downtown Alamo.
WHAT A DISASTER!
If it was such a good idea, why wasn’t it done decades ago? Why isn’t every home in the San Ramon Valley installed solar?
Because the paypack, over time, makes no sense. Add to that, the continuing overhead and it’s a loser in the long run.
The biggest installations of Solar are at government facilities!!!
So this is how another $25 million slips through our fingers! Unbelievable.
Couldn’t this be spent on updating our school facilities? We have many schools that have outdated facilities or are in need of repairs. Of course the district wants to reduce their dependence on PG & E….then us the public would not be able to see how wasteful they are with our school’s energy use. I have kids at our public schools and I walk by classrooms with doors wide open in 104 degree weather and the air conditioning is blasting. Teachers are not able to control their classroom temps because the master temp has been set for the entire facility. Lights are left on in rooms over weekends. I thought there was a list of improvements that have been presented to the school board for our local schools….can’t this money be directed at these items? The belows lists the requirement for use of the bond and I think the items on the list meet these. Please correct if I’m wrong…it just seems so wasteful and the board might be doing what is “the trend”, going green/lowering our carbon footprint.
100 percent of the issuance proceeds will be used for construction of public school facilities, rehabilitation, or repair of public school facilities, acquisition of land on which public school facilities will be constructed with proceeds of issuance, or for equipment related to the project constructed or rehabilitated with proceeds of issuance.
Global Warming (aka Climate Fraud) is and has always been an Enviro-scam.
Tremendous warning from the late Michael Chriton on Environmentalism as a religion:
http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2009/11/26/a-blast-from-the-past-3/
The US military sees global warming as a huge threat to our national security and is taking steps to prepare for more terrorism and violence in nations that will be destabilized by drought and climate change. The US military is not a left wing eco-organization that would readily believe “Al Gore BS”. There is scientific evidence for climate change that transcends partisan bickering.
Using the bonds for updating facilities would worsen the district’s budget troubles, because the money has to be paid back in 14-16 years. The district has no money in its general fund to pay back $25 million. If the bonds are used for solar, the money saved from the district’s PG&E bill will be used to pay back the bonds. The most conservative calculations show that the district would not just break even on energy costs, but would actually make money right away.
Another typical wasteful project. What that district needs are a few good teacher for required courses in Math, physics, chemistry and logic. However, providing good secondary school instruction was the downfall of the Soviet Union. People were taught well enough in schools so that they started thinking and removed the more egregious features of communism. You can be sure that the teachers’ unions here and the school boards will not make the same mistake here.
It would be interesting to see a cost-effectiveness study from the energy standpoint on this boondoggle.
Dear Dolores,
Here is a resource that will help your readers understand Solar payback periods: http://www.house-energy.com/Solar/Costs-Payback-Solar.htm
CDSI courtesy
And here is a resource for you and yur readers. There are numbers of course and these show the foolishness of the School Board.
Besides: bonds are the worst way to finance anything.
From ENVIRONMENT AND CLIMATE NEWS, SEPTEMBER 2009
Energy Expert Obama spoke recently at Nellis Air Force Base, where government has caused the construction (completed 2007) of a 140 acre solar array at a cost of $100 million to produce 14 Megawatts of electricity when the sun is shining. [Actually it may produce some also when the sun is not shining but I don’t know how much.]
140 Acre = 566,560 sq meters
1 acres = 4 046.85642 square meters
More about calculator.
140 acres = 140×4046.85642 sq meters = 565,560 sq meters
1 Acre = 4,046.85642 sq meters = 4.046×10-3 sq kilometers
0.004046 sq km 00
More about calculator.
1 sq kilometer =1,000,000 sq meters = 247.1 acre
with 1 kW per sq meter
566,560 sq meter >> 556,560 kW = 556 Megawatt (~ 1kW per sq meter)
So solar cell efficienvy is 14 MW/556 MW = 0.025. [Can’t be that low]
Nellis AFB reports power output of 30,100 Megawatt hours per year for this array.
Total US electric power production is 4,038 ,000,000 Megawatt hour per year in 2005
Averaged over 8,760 hours in a year this is 460,959 Megawatt
Summer peak capacity (in 2004) was 962.900 Megawatt
The cost to build (completed in 1988) the three reactor Palo Verde nuclear power station was $5.9 billion
In 2007 Palo Verde produced 26,782,000 Megawatthour of electric energy
26,782,000/8,760= 3,057 MW (about 1000 MW per reactor)
Nelis produced 30,100 Megawatthr
30,100/ 8,760= 3.43 Megawatt average
As the output is 14 Megawatt the plant produces only for 2,146 hours a year (when the sun is brightly shining)
Correcting costs by the U.S. consumer price index,
Palo Verde cost $4.35 billion per reactor or $13.05 billion total
Nellis cost $106 million
[both in 2009 dollars]
Each reactor at Palo Verde cost 41 times as much as the Nellis solar plant and produces 297 times as much electricity while occupying far less land than the Nellis solar array.
That means that the capital cost of electricity from the solar array at Nellis is 7.2 higher than at Palo Verde.
With modern designs (the Palo Verde is 1970s and 1980s technology) and fuel reprocessing, the 2009 cost of a Palo Verde equivalent is estimated to be about half that of the original plant.
That makes the solar power at Nellis AFB 15 times more expensive than nuclear power.
Moreover, the Nellis solar power facility has not produced any energy at all!
Construction of a power plant requires energy and energy equivalents [whatever that may be]. Until the plant has produced the amount of energy that was required to build it, it is not a net energy producer. [Good definition for ALL power plants.]
The Nellis solar array requires $100 million worth of energy of various forms to build. [It would be important to show how this was calculated . Better yet Energy should be given in energy units (kWh, Megajoule, Btu, etc).
Assuming a price of 12 cents per kWh of electricity and 8 cents accounted as return capital. The remaining 4 cents is needed to pay for operational costs, base load power, grid changes to accommodate the intermittent supply, and other items [probably losses in conversion of DC to AC]. With its current output this $100 million will be returned at a rate of about 2 percent per year.
This estimate may be overly optimistic, since Nellis AFB advertises that the power plant “saves” the base $1 million per year. That is a return of just 1 percent per year.
The Nellis 140 acre solar array is actually a very large energy storage device – battery. It stores the energy required to build it and returns that energy at a maximum rate of 1 to 2 percent per year over a period of 50 to 100 years [And wolar cells also deteriorate in time, certainly over so many years. If you happen to see a contract PG&E offers for residential solar installation you will notice a provision that there is expected a certain decline in the capacity of the solar cells over time.]
Only after it has returned the $100 million worth of energy does the plant become an energy producer.
Nuclear and hydrocarbon efficiency
The cost of Palo Verde by contrast was $13 billion in 2009 dollars. Assuming a price of 12 cents per kWh, Palo Verde produces $3.2 billion per year and pays back the entire capital investment in six years.
This means that Palo Verde functioned as an energy storage device for six years and then became a net producer of energy.
If we assume a 50 year lifetime for both plants Palo Verde will produce about $100 billion worth of net energy during those 50 years.
The Nellis AFB installation will NEVER produce any energy at all because the entire 50 years will be spent in replacing the energy used in its construction.
A small [number?] part of Palo Verde operating cost is storage of spent nuclear fuel—the famous nuclear waste problem. But this problem was entirely made in Washington by onerous regulations that prevent the use of breeder reactors [Describe the process here] and nuclear fuel reprocessing. When these tehnologies are employed, as they are in other countries, residual nuclear waste is negiligible [Figures are needed here].
Regarding hydrocarbon power plants, politicians claim that hydrocarbons cause global warming. There is no experimental or observational scientific evidence to support this claim. More than 30,000 American scientists have petitioned the U.S. government to cease relying on those claims.
Solar Environmental Destruction
The 104 remaining nuclear power plants, mostly built with 1970s and 1980s technology, still produce more than 8 percent of the energy of the United States, safely, cleanly and inexpensively.
Their total actual electric power output in 2008 was 806,665,000 MWh
[./.4,038 ,000,000 MWh = 0.199~20%]
This is the equivalent of 3.75 million acres or 5,862 square miles of solar cells like those recently installed at Nellis AFB and lauded by Obama [advised by a 1/3 Nobel laureate] as the advanced technology he plans to force upon the U.S..
To provide 100 percent of U.S. Energy needs through Nellis-type solar power plants [as it is often glibly said that the electric cars will be run by solar power plants] would require installation of about 70,000 square miles of solar panels and equpment at a cost of about $30,000 billion, an unobtainable amount of capital.
The 70,000 square miles of solar panels would cover an area the size of Maryland, Hawaii, Masachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, rhode Island, and Washington DC, combined. Those are relatively small states; Oklahoma and Michigan alone would be sufficient or half of California. [List here areas of European countries, also convert to square kilometers.]
Wind power has the same disadvantage as solar – very large capital costs for very small amount of energy.
The only methods that actually produce net energy at a reasonable cost are hydrocarbon and nuclear. [Does hydrocarbon include coal?] Hydroelectric power is also practical but most available sites are already developed [over the protests of envronmentalists].
Here are just some of the school districts in California that have gone solar:
In February, San Jose Unified School district dedicated its new 5.5 mega Watt system, and they are looking at $25 million in energy cost savings over the 25 year life of the project.
Milpitas Unified School District installed a 3.4 megaW system, which has reduced the district’s energy costs by more than 22%, which translates to an estimated $12 million savings over the life of the project.
The Contra Costa Community College district has installed a 3.2 mega Watt system. They project savings of $70 million over 25 years.
Fresno State University installed a 1 mega Watt system and is projecting a savings of $13 million over the 30 year life of the system.
San Diego municipalities, school districts, university, and water district aggressively applied for and received $154 million dollars in Clean Renewable Energy Bonds this year to invest in 192 solar energy projects expected to produce 20 megawatts.
The Los Angeles Unified School District announced they will be investing $350 million dollar into solar panels to generate 50 megawatts of power by 2012. The goal is to lower the school district’s 80 million dollar annual electric bill and allow for economic stimulus by creating green jobs.
UC Irvine has announced that it will install solar.
San Mateo Unified School District has announced it will be installing solar.
These are just some of the school districts in California that have crunched the numbers and have found that going solar makes economic sense. We would not be the first school district to take advantage of the rebates and federal stimulus money available to help with our budget crisis.
Hey Vlado…I thought of adding something, but you covered it very well. The comment by a parent just after yours…is a typical enviro-dreamer…they come and they go…the problem is while they’re here they cause nothing but problems. The only advise I have for the parent is to stay parenting and leave the difficult stuff to the common sense folks.
You may say that I’m an enviro-dreamer.
But I’m not the only one.
I hope some day you’ll join us.
And the world will be as one.
Parent: perfect response. No ego, no “if you don’t agree with me you are a dim-wit. Just a concise message on who has tried solar, and a respectful and creative follow up comment. That’s a rarity.